Jonathan should be the one writing this but he’s already dead.

He died in 2018 but a part of his soul first began wandering the day his captain called an emergency ascent in the submarine. It wasn’t something Jonathan was supposed to tell me but he did anyway because sometimes the pieces of memory that torture us the most need to be shared. They need to redistribute their weight. I understand. Even if the ears that hear our stories can’t fully comprehend their depth, it alleviates some of the heaviness, releasing bits of gravity like a stream flushing sediment down to its widening delta. The churning waters of origination always naturally attempt to spread out and calm.

The couch’s old, worn fabric scratched my hands like sandpaper as I dug my fingernails into the thick, woven threads and let the news sink in—the truth in it was undeniable. For the first time in my life I turned to the person I loved the most, the guardian assigned to me at my birth, and looked upon them with distrust.

“You lied to me,” I said. “You lied.”