alexvause1988
A poetic memoir of survival, love, and transformation
"Grief moves through the apartment like smoke through keyholes.
It knows the shape of your throat."
Alex is sixteen when she sees her-platinum hair catching streetlight outside a convenience store. A girl who laughs like she hasn't learned to be afraid yet.
But they're both carrying creatures. The kind that live in your chest and teach you that wanting things will only get you hurt.
This is not a love story about saving each other.
This is about two girls who meet in the wreckage and cling to each other while drowning. About disappearing and reappearing. About the two years Alex spends becoming someone who can stay, only to learn that transformation isn't the same as salvation.
About new names on the Oregon coast-Rose and Stepanka-and discovering that safety can be its own kind of drowning when you don't know who you are without survival.
About the breakup that saved them both.
About five years of swimming alone.
About finding each other again as whole people and learning that love is not completion-it's choice. Daily. Intentional. Sustainable.
and about what happens when one of you starts forgetting.
When the only way to hold on is to read your own story back to you, over and over, hoping something in the words will bring you home.
Told in episodes like poetry, like philosophy, like watching someone you love disappear while their body remains.
This is a book about creatures and oceans. About kintsugi-mending breaks with gold. About the difference between surviving together and living apart.
About memory and forgetting. About grief and devotion. About how love, in its final form, is simply: I was here. You were here. We were here together.
For anyone who has ever loved someone while drowning.
For anyone who had to let go to survive.
For anyone learning that love is not rescue-it's recognition...
"The ocean keeps moving. We keep choosing. And that-finally, beautifully, sustainably-is enough."