Later that day, I found myself standing in front of what remained of our village, and I couldn’t help but acknowledge the ache in my chest, the urge to scream until my lungs no longer allowed me to do so. There were no words to describe the pain that I was feeling, to describe the internal suffering that I was going through. As if things weren’t already bad enough, this was what I had come back to. A life in Atlantis that I had ruined, and now, a life on the mainland that I had ruined too. A life that no longer awaited me here.
There was a part of me that resented myself for leaving, that hated the fact that I could have been here to prevent all of this from happening—whatever it was that had happened in the first place—and I hadn’t. I had been back in Atlantis, wasting time on something
