Author's Notes: A quick one-shot – because I feel bad for not updating. Believe it or not, it took me AGES to get around to finishing this. I started this in September. sighs Yea I write unbearably slow. And I think this isn't all that great either… I'll probably end up rewriting it someday. You'll notice that I changed my style in this one-shot. Just a bit of experimenting. ) Please let me know what you think about it.
Echoes of the Ocean
By Onewingdtenshi07
"Could the heart once broken ever fully love again? A little less… each time it was a little harder for the heart to heal, a little less easy for the heart to give and trust. Some day, it might never heal or love again."
- Wish-chan
Some days are so simple, he thinks. The waves lap at his bare feet but he pays them no mind, and softly gazes out to the vast sea. The roar of the ocean is deep but peaceful.
Some days, he is accompanied by the gulls that soar far above his head, and if he looks hard enough, he thinks he can see the fins of dolphins swimming in the sea.
The beach is his refuge - the only place he ever visits when he's not at work. He doesn't count the hours that he spends sitting there by the water's edge. He only knows that when he comes, the sun is high above his head, and when he leaves, it has long gone far past the edge of the horizon.
"You never loved me," she had told him on the morning that she left. If he had turned around, he would have seen that her face was pained, and that she had tears streaked down her cheeks. But he didn't. He had kept his back to her as he tuned the machines – open, fix, wrench, shut, polish, again and again and again… always pushing forward mindlessly. Always pushing her away.
"Tch. I'm at work. Talk to me later."
She fumbles with the letter in her hands, wrinkling it, ruining it.
"You never visit the beach with me anymore," her words were small and helpless.
"You don't call. You don't visit. You don't even talk to me anymore." Her voice breaks. She stands there like an idiot for an infinite moment, and the silence that he gives her makes her want to break.
"Say something," her voice is tiny and wavers.
She pleads. He gives no answer. Won't she give me some piece of mind? Tch.. If he ignores her, she'll go away. Women who talked too much were a nuisance. A hindrance. Annoying.
He didn't even catch the hitch in her throat. Her hands stopped wrenching the letter abruptly, and as she slowly exhales, she smoothes the paper out.
"You never loved me…"
It echoes in the wind, in the sound of the waves.
That's not true.
"You never loved me…"
Stop saying that.
He closes his eyes, lifts his face to the salty breeze, and tries to imagine her face. Only, the lines that were supposed to define her were distorted. What did her nose look like? Her chin? Her ears? Her neckline? Hazy. Fuzzy. Blurred.
"You never loved me…" she says, and this time her voice is fading, fading, fading away. It falls - a decrescendo, and he could almost feel her painfully sweet, sweet breath on his ear. And an invisible fist seizes his lungs and suffocates him. The pain in his chest intensifies because rather than chase after her, he simply lets her drift and go.
"You never loved me…" she whispers, and in a second, turns and walks away.
He opens his eyes and stares forlornly at the faraway horizon. His thoughts reside on his dark memories.
"You never loved me…" And something inside him breaks and shatters to a million pieces. He wants to die.
"Maybe you're right…" he says to himself finally. It is an epiphany that wrenches his gut. He drowns in bitterness and self-contempt.
"Maybe I never did."
