The Stages of Grief
Kate learns how to deal.
Acceptance
The dirt settles and she can see.
She lunges forward with the net stretched between her hands, splashing herself with water up to her torso, but the fish is too quick for her. She hasn't regained her balance when she tries again, following the fish to a nearby rock. Now, she thinks, she'll be able to corner it. She launches a train of lunges. The water gets murky, the white sand and dirt having been cast into a swirl with all her flouncing about.
"Wrong." Jin says, coming from behind her. "Look." And she does. Sun's teaching him English has paid off. Now they can talk, even if it's only in fragments.
"You keep still." He stands, his feet far apart, as though waiting to pounce; the net stretched out to their limits in his hands. He stays like that for a good few seconds. "Dirt go down so you see fish where," he explains. She wonders where he gets that sort of composure, dignified and at the same time, quite plain.
She nods and tries to assume the position she had just seen Jin demonstrate. But when the fish makes a reappearance, she forgets composure and dives in after it. And she gives it all she's got. She doesn't care anymore; how wet she gets, how silly she must look or how irrationally desperate she must seem. This is between her and the fish; no matter what, she tells herself, this time it wasn't getting away. She comes close enough; she practically could feel its scales leaving a trace of slime in her hands. But she comes away from the tussle with nothing. The fish slips away, quietly.
"Let go," he says. The fish, she says to herself, he means the fish.
"But that was our dinner" is all she could get out, the frantic exertion rendering her momentarily breathless. She wipes off the salt water from her face and rests her hands on her knees, letting them carry her weight.
He shakes his head. That makes her look at him. "You do not own anything. You cannot." He says it in his distinct, matter-of-fact way. There it is again, that same composure, and it unsettles her, tips the balance of guilt and pain she has made for herself so she could function.
She only nods, a brief feeling of relief washing over her. And then, a flash of pain in her brain.
So this is it then, this is how it's going to be. This is how she's going to live the rest of her life. Peace will come and go like the waves. And an interval away, so shall pain.
So that's that. tell me what you think.