Page 35 of Blue in the Deep Blue Sea

“Annie.” I pressed my hand against her face. “Annie, don’t leave me. Please, not you too.”

I heard him walk away. He didn’t say another word.

He just left.

I lowered my head again as the tears kept falling.

“1Piccola,“ an older woman said softly, trying to pull me away.

She managed to move me only an inch before I collapsed over Annie again.

From somewhere behind me, I heard someone say they had seen her jump into the sea from that cliff. And I didn’t even know she was here.

She was supposed to come tomorrow. We were supposed to prepare for the Light Festival, and now there was no point. There would be no light left in it.

My only friend is gone.

No. It’s not true. She’s just sleeping.

I shook my head and gently patted her cheeks, but she didn’t move. She lay there completely still, as though I didn’t exist. Pink glitter covered my fingertips, and I stared at it, unable to look away.

She had been happy.

Another set of footsteps approached. This time it was Gianni. He pulled me away from her, and this time, he managed.

“She’s gone,” he whispered. “We have to go. They’re taking her to the coroner’s office.”??“Gianni, no, she’s not dead,” I cried. “She can’t leave me. She just can’t.”

My fists slammed against his chest.

“Why do people always leave me? What’s wrong with me?”

“Nothing.” He pulled me closer. “Just… sometimes, something is wrong with people.”

I snapped back to the present, wiping away my tears.

That’s how it is. I wish I could tell you it gets easier, but it doesn’t. There comes a time when you learn how to keep going, when you laugh again and life carries you forward. Then, on the most ordinary day, you stumble across something that reminds you of them. Suddenly, they’re everywhere again, and all you canthink about is how much you wish your favorite person were still here.

That’s what Annie was to me.

She was my favorite person.

My best friend.

Sometimes I still catch myself talking as if she’s here, as if she’ll come back this summer and we’ll go to the Light Festival together. We’ll catch up like nothing ever happened. But no matter how long I waited on the beach with two pieces of paper and a bottle, she never came.

I always made a wish for her, too.

Mine was to turn back time. To hold her a little tighter. To smile with her a little longer. To convince her to stay with me. To talk to me.

And for her… I wished she would come back to me.

Then I’d throw the bottle into the sea, hoping that maybe, just maybe, the sea would grant that wish.

But I know my wishes will never come true.

Only my fears do.

It’s been a year, but it feels like a decade. I guess that’s what grief does. A minute without your favorite person feels like a year, and a year without Annie feels like a lifetime.