TIDESONG

Episode 12: The Weight Of Wanting

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December arrived cold and gray.

The semester was winding down. Final papers loomed. The creative writing submissions piled up on Emily's desk, each one a small piece of someone's interior life, entrusted to her for judgment.

Malachi's final story arrived on the last day of class.

He didn't stay after to discuss it. He didn't linger at her desk or find excuses to be near her. He simply placed the manuscript on the corner of her lectern—a clean stack of pages, clipped neatly together—and walked out the door with the other students.

Emily waited until the room emptied.

Then she opened the first page.

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The Space Between, by Malachi Miller

In the year before she learned to swim, my grandmother stood at the edge of the ocean every morning and watched the tide come in. She was forty-three years old and had never been in water deeper than her own bathtub. She was afraid—of drowning, of the cold, of the unknown creatures that lived beneath the surface. But she stood at the edge anyway, every morning, because her daughter had moved three thousand miles away and the ocean was the only thing between them that she could see.

She told me this story when I was seventeen years old and trying to decide whether to become the person my father wanted me to be. I asked her how she finally learned to swim.

She said: "One day I realized that standing at the edge was its own kind of drowning. So I walked in."

She said: "The water was cold. The water was deep. The water held me anyway."

She said: "Sometimes the only way across is through."

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Emily read the story three times.

It was not about a grandmother. It was not about swimming. It was about a young man standing at the edge of something vast and unknown, trying to decide whether the fear of drowning was worse than the fear of never entering the water at all.

It was about her.

She picked up her phone.

Your story, she wrote. The ending.

Three dots appeared. Disappeared. Appeared again.

Yes.

I don't know what to say.

You don't have to say anything. It's a story. It doesn't ask for anything.

A pause.

But if it did ask. If it could ask.

What would it ask for?

She stared at the screen.

Her thumbs hovered above the keyboard. The cursor blinked, patient and steady.

It would ask, she wrote, whether the water is worth the cold.

His response came immediately.

It would say: I've been standing at the edge my whole life. I'm ready to walk in.

But I won't go alone.

—M

Emily set down her phone.

Her hands were shaking.

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