—Lily

I flip to the next page, but it’s blank. That was the last time I ever wrote to Ellen.

I also never heard from Atlas again, and a huge part of me never blamed him. He almost died at the hands of my father. There’s not much room for forgiveness there.

I knew he survived and that he was okay, because my curiosity has sometimes gotten the best of me over the years and I’d find what I could about him online. There wasn’t much, though. Enough to let me know he’d survived and that he was in the military.

I still never got him out of my head, though. Time made things better, but sometimes I would see something that would remind me of him and it would put me in a funk. It wasn’t until I was in college for a couple of years and dating someone else that I realized maybe Atlas wasn’t supposed to be my whole life. Maybe he was only supposed to be a part of it.

Maybe love isn’t something that comes full circle. It just ebbs and flows, in and out, just like the people in our lives.

On a particularly lonely night in college, I went alone to a tattoo studio and had a heart put in the spot where he used to kiss me. It’s a tiny heart, about the size of a thumbprint, and it looks just like the heart he carved for me out of the oak tree. It’s not fully closed at the top and I wonder if Atlas carved the heart like that on purpose. Because that’s how my heart feels every time I think about him. It just feels like there’s a little hole in it, letting out all the air.

After college I ended up moving to Boston, not necessarily because I was hoping to find him, but because I had to see for myself if Boston really was better. Plethora held nothing for me anyway, and I wanted to get as far away from my father as I could. Even though he was sick and could no longer hurt my mother, he still somehow made me want to escape the entire state of Maine, so that’s exactly what I did.

Seeing Atlas in his restaurant for the first time filled me with so many emotions, I didn’t know how to process them. I was glad to see that he was okay. I was happy that he looked healthy. But I would be lying if I said I wasn’t a little bit heartbroken that he never tried to find me like he promised.

I love him. I still do and I always will. He was a huge wave that left a lot of imprints on my life, and I’ll feel the weight of that love until I die. I’ve accepted that.

But things are different now. After today when he walked out of my office, I thought long and hard about us. I think our lives are where they’re supposed to be. I have Ryle. Atlas has his girlfriend. We both have the careers we’d always hoped for. Just because we didn’t end up on the same wave, doesn’t mean we aren’t still a part of the same ocean.