TNT Short Fics

all out to sea

Empty. That is how the grief envelops you. After the first shock of leaving him, all that remains is numb.

You try to fill it. Try to take this gigantic hole where your heart used to be and put something over top of it. Like throwing a rug over a stain on the carpet. It's still there no matter how you try to pretend.

The pretending makes it worse. When it doesn't measure up to a stupid fantasy you built up in your head on lonely nights, it just casts the hole deeper. Only now you wonder if there is a way out. Anyone to help you out. You go off the deep end, clinging to the mere hint of feeling until that is done too. Leaving in its wake a desolation that steals your breath from the combined losses.

You'd wonder if anyone sees this gaping wound but you're starting to think no one is looking too closely at you. Grief does something to people. It makes them uncomfortable, pushes them to hasten you to move on, get over it, overcome. People like normal so they take your fake smiles and busy schedule as flimsy proof you are fine so they don't have to face the unease.

The few people who do see you, you avoid. Dodge questions, pick fights. If they can't get close, they can't make you examine your life.

When you're alone, you sit in a chair on the roof and just stare at nothing. You scroll on your phone until that too feels like panic. You tell yourself you're going to organize the closet, anything to pass the time, until you find a hat or his sweater or a photo, and the memories threaten you once again.

The only place you let yourself feel is with a pen in hand, harsh scribbles across the page, pouring everything out. The drowning sadness of the loss of six years of your life. The harsh slash of anger for the person who tried to take advantage of that sadness. The contempt at yourself for falling for it. And rage for everyone that made you feel you were not allowed to be anything less than the perfect picture in their heads. Somedays you sit on the floor of the studio and never record a note. Instead, you pour salve on your wounds with ink. Other days, you sit on the porch at Long Pond and watch a little boy run round and round his dad, free from all the hurt the people around him experience simply by growing up and you wish for that innocence.

Until one day, you feel the tiniest spark of something like joy at the sight of Robin's mud-covered smile. And it opens up the smallest crack to let light in. You call your friend that you've been avoiding. You apologize to your mom for the screaming match you goaded her into last month. You sit on the roof and you feel the warmth of the sun on your skin for the first time all year. It compels you to grab your guitar, not to make something new but to play something for fun. Something from a favorite artist, one of the earliest you ever learned. Back when life was easy.

Standing on the stage feels less like pretending and more like a moment of healing. You laugh, you bring out your friends, you joke when you mess up the words, and you smile when a crowd of thousands sing along to a song that used to be your deepest teenage heartache but is now mended. Just like the wound you have now will someday heal.

It isn't perfect or linear or easy, but it's yours. The worry that that that was it for you, that you will be lonely for the rest of your life doesn't leave, but it also doesn't mean you have to chase something. You and the girls spend a holiday weekend deciding that when it happens, it will happen. Or maybe it won't. And you have to be okay with that. You have each other and maybe the future looks differently than your dreams. But if by some chance you get the opportunity again, this time you won't compromise on what you want those dreams to be in the name of keeping someone close.

The wound scars over but is still tender, still raw, still itches. It prickles at the email that comes in with the final documents of the sale of the London house. Twinges at the snippet of a song that trails out of a car in traffic. But it holds. Until one day you open your messages to a barrage of texts from friends about some guy putting you on blast on his podcast. Enough to get you to watch. And when you laugh at his confidence and blushing pink cheeks, you think maybe you'll do something daring, curious to see how it feels.

Weeks later and you know. You feel alive. You meant to have a fun conversation and maybe flirt a little with a handsome guy. And instead, you accidentally found something neither of you knew was missing. It doesn't fix anything but it opens places in you, you didn't even know were there. Opens up the space in your heart that had pleaded to the sky to let it once be you.

Your scars are still there. He has his own. Neither of you is stupid enough to think this thing between you will magically change the last year of your life. Somedays you still sit in the chair on the roof and feel numb, but those days dwindle. And more than that, one day he sits with you and his hand in yours pulls you from the grey and into the sunny late summer day around you. You tell him that you might always wait for the other shoe to drop and he has to be okay with that. But you also record a song on a whim about your first weekend in his town and when Aaron plays it back for you, he remarks that it's the happiest song you've ever worked on together with a knowing look on his face.

Happy. Something you thought was gone forever, now sits over everything you do. Even healing. The scars fade each day and the songs you finish and set aside to give to the world take some of the hurt and grief with them for good. The hard parts of life are met with his hand in yours. And you finally feel as if you are filled to the brim with not only love and joy but also resilience and mettle. You did this, you got through this even when there were times you thought you might die trying. And here on the other side, you feel ready. So you take all those hurt pieces—the rage, the empty grief, and yes, even some of that hope and happiness and you have it pressed into the grooves of 33 ⅓ rpm and set it free. It's not yours anymore. What is yours, are the lessons you learned, the stitched-up heart, the battle scar, and the man who looked through it all and grabbed tight to your hand and didn't let go.

The world can have your past. You have your present. You have your future.