Static at the Water's Edge

The coaxial **cable** dangling from the hotel room wall had been severed clean through, leaving me staring at a television screen that couldn't decide between gray and darker gray. Outside, Hurricane Elena was making her approach, and I was three days into what was supposed to be a romantic week that now felt like a cruel joke.

My phone buzzed with his third text of the hour: "We need to talk." I pressed it face-down on the nightstand, the way you'd smother something that wasn't quite dead yet.

The balcony doors shuddered as **lightning** splintered the sky—a violent fork that illuminated the churning ocean below. For a heartbeat, the world turned bone-white and stark as an X-ray. That's when it hit me: this entire relationship had been built on silences we'd refused to fill, conversations we'd postponed until they fossilized into resentment.

I stepped onto the balcony, rain peppering my arms like tiny, frantic keys. Below, the pool was **swimming** with debris—palm fronds, lounge chair cushions, someone's abandoned paperback. The water itself churned with the same chaotic energy I'd been swallowing for months.

Another flash of lightning. In that split second, I saw my own **palm** pressed against the glass, and for the first time in three years, I didn't see his name there in some imagined future. I saw the lines of my own life branching in directions I'd stopped considering.

I picked up my phone, typed "I know," and sent it before I could reconsider. Then I turned off the phone completely.

The television flickered—caught a signal for just long enough to show a weather map with my exact location in its crosshairs—before fading back to gray. Somewhere in that static, I found the clarity I'd been avoiding.

The storm would pass. That was the thing about storms. Eventually, they always did.