the boy who went quiet like the sea

once there was a boy

who loved a girl made of starlight,

and she loved an ocean

because the ocean never left

it only pulled back sometimes,

low tide,

and came home again.

he used to say her eyes weren’t sky

or sea,

they were earth

brown,

warm,

the color of ground you could actually stand on,

soft at the edges

like something an angel

had traced too gently

to leave a hard line.

her father was a lighthouse

that stopped shining

before she learned to read its warnings.

she grew up steering by a light

that wasn’t there,

learning the hard way

that some shores

wait for ships

that were never coming back.

and still, somehow,

her face kept its own tide

cheeks that rose full and round

like moons refusing to wane

no matter how dark the water got,

a mouth soft and full,

poured like something

that never hardened

even when it should have,

even when he gave it

every reason to.

the boy did not know this

the night she said

he could not be the lighthouse

her father should have been.

something in him

went out

like a switch,

not a choice

and he did what drowning men do.

he stopped moving.

he stopped speaking.

he let the water close over his head

and called it peace.

he blocked the shore

so the shore

wouldn’t watch him sink.

she screamed his name

from the surface,

but underwater

sound doesn’t arrive as sound.

it arrives as pressure.

as a shape moving through the dark

that used to be a voice.

he couldn’t hear her.

he felt her instead

a vibration against his skin

where his ears had already given up,

the way you feel a storm

before you see it,

the way the deep

still knows

when something above it

is breaking.

so he came back up.

gasping.

sorry.

holding on to her

the way a drowning man

holds on to solid ground

and her eyes were the ground.

brown,

steady,

the only earth

in a life made of tides,

and even wrecked,

even shaking,

her mouth still curved

like it was building

a shore

to forgive him on.

but the girl made of starlight

kept a scar where the lighthouse

used to be,

and now a second one

beside it,

smaller,

shaped like a boy

who went quiet

when she needed noise.

she called it unchosen.

he called it

the only way he knew

to survive loving her

without destroying her too.

both of them were right.

that’s the cruelest kind of story

no villain,

just two people

speaking different languages

made of the same silence.

so now, the boy stands at the edge of the water

and talks to the girl

like she’s still made of stars,

because she is,

and he says: