Gates of Abbot

Chapter three: Water under the bridge

I knew love once. The sky was bluer, days were longer, and my tears ceased to exist, as if they'd never belonged to me in the first place. It was the only time the weight of the world faded away. The ocean wasn't an enemy anymore; it was distant, harmless, and I didn't blame it for the world's unraveling. Everything felt eternal, as I assume it did once in the past.

It was only me and him against the world, floating in a perfect moment, suspended in a place where reality couldn't reach us. But fate, like the relentless tides, had other plans.

Just as the oceans rose and swallowed the land, so too did it end up creeping into our love. He was assigned his first mission as a Newlander, those very few of us who were tasked with finding new land after the first ocean's rise. Their role was to reconnect The Eventides with other potential survivors out in the world. I remember him trying to contact me everyday ever since he was recruited, every night, to say our last goodbye, but I didn't let him. I prolonged the inevitable and kept him away until the very last day, and when the time came, he took off and I never saw him again. All that was left from him was a handwritten letter, one I could tell cost him a lot to write by the way it was wrinkled and full of blobs, those I can only assume to have been from every single tear he let out as he wrote.

I never got to know what it said, though. I was too stupid back then to have kept the letter. Instead, I ripped it up and threw it away into the ocean before I could open it, in the same direction I had last seen him take off when I ran all across the pier last minute, one minute too late to reach him.

I blamed myself for not stopping him, for not kissing him goodbye when I had the chance. I still blame myself for not reading the damn letter. Now, I was bound to remember his handwriting every time the mailman passes by, his voice whenever someone sings his go to karaoke song, and his face... every time I walk by that same pier. At least I have never visited it since.

Eventually, after many failures from the Newlanders and, consecutively, all of the grief their disappearances brought to each of their families, the town decided to stop the search for something we knew deep down didn't exist anymore. If there is still someone out there, another surviving group, we would just have to wait for them to come and find us. And so, The Eventides decided to focus on what was certain and present. Its people. Each other.

But I couldn't do the same as the rest.

I was left broken when it all suddenly came to an end. I had lost him and, gradually, myself too. There was no one else for me to root for. And so, my lame low spirit was born. If I wasn't already the type to casually go out and socialize with the outside world, I sunk even deeper and got swallowed by the darkest of blackholes when he left. I sat next to my bedroom window every night for days straight, looking outside at the water flowing under the Nereids bridge. It was a reminder of how the world was moving on without me, carelessly and ever so naturally. I stayed up more and more late as the days went by, to the point were I could easily find myself going to sleep at dawn. But that bad habit came to an end on a random Friday night.

I stayed up long enough to notice a young boy, blond with soft curls that fell over his forehead, standing in the edge of the bridge as he played with his life. I immediately ran out and sprinted in his direction, towards the bridge, it only being a fair walking distance from the back of my house. The sound of my big reaching footsteps alarmed him but, thankfully, not enough to make him jump.

"What are you doing?!" I yelled, and I wasn't even done running before I did.

I was panting, trying to catch my breath. When I finally caught up to him, I got a better view at the scene. His grey shirt, dirty long blue jeans and both of his shoes were all laying on the floor next to him, as to why he was only in his underwear when facing the water.