Part VI · Settled
The Wreckage
You spend your life
building something that floats—
your hands in every nail,
your breath in every seam.
It creaks in places,
leans slightly to the left,
but it holds.
It carries the weight of everything
you once believed love could save.
And then—
a storm.
Not one you saw coming.
Not one you could outrun.
Just sky,
splitting open
like a secret too long held in.
The ocean unlearns stillness.
The wind forgets mercy.
And the thing you built
starts coming apart
in your hands.
You do not scream.
You do not save it.
You go under.
Salt in your lungs.
Wood in your fists.
You surface holding a piece of what mattered—
a splinter, a memory,
a single name carved into the grain.
And the waves,
they do what grief does:
they rise.
They fall.
They come faster than your breath
and larger than your faith.
At first, they tower—
a hundred feet,
ten seconds apart.
You don’t swim.
You endure.
Your arms ache from holding on.
Your body forgets how to rest.
But grief has tides too.
Eventually,
the waves slow.
Not disappear—never disappear—
but soften.
Eighty feet.
Then forty.
Then far enough apart
that you can speak your own name
without drowning in it.
You never let go of the wreckage.
You wouldn’t if you could.
You love it too much—
the way a father loves
what’s already gone.
What held him up
before it went under.
Some days,
a wave still rises.
Out of nowhere.
But you no longer mistake it
for drowning.
You ride it.
Let it take you
somewhere closer to memory
than pain.
Because grief,
at its gentlest,
is just love
that’s outlived its home.
And you—
still floating,
still aching—
you carry that home
in your hands.