Sometimes I wish I could become the sea. The sea, in its unrelenting, irreverent, endless entirety.
I stare at it long after the sun sets, long after the surfers clear the dark beach, long after the cars on the highway behind me become few and far between. Waves crash on the sand, and for a few minutes at a time, I shut my eyes and listen, and I convince myself that it’s healing me.
I feel a hand on my shoulder, and I know who it is long before I turn around. I would know her anywhere. I would know her here, and I would know her in the burning fires of the end of the world.
Because that’s what we’re waiting for, isn’t it?
“The great pacific,” I whisper. She pulls herself closer, wrapping her other arm around me, resting her chin on my shoulder.
“Mhm,” she breathes.
“Sometimes, I can’t believe how big it is.”
She sighs. “Come back to bed, Tony. Come back inside.”
She means well. I know she does. But sometimes she just doesn’t understand.
“I can’t sleep,” I tell her. I don’t tell her that I can never seem to sleep these days. I don’t tell her that my heart always seems to beat out of time and that the sea is the only place I feel calm anymore. Well, that, and with her.
“I know.”
She surprises me with that one.
I feel the need to fill the silence. “My head, I just—“
“Kiss me,” she says, and only then do I turn to look at her. I can’t see much in the dim starlight on this lonely cliffside, but I see her eyes searching mine. I wonder what she’s looking for.
I lean forward, and she takes my head in her hands as our lips touch. It feels like coming home. I breathe her in, like fire, like life, like maybe she’ll fill my soul with the love that I’ve never really had before. Soon, though, I’m reminded that I’ve had this love for years.
I have everything I could ever want. I have this woman, touched by fire, a soul older than the great pacific sea itself. She is my better half. And we have a child, a baby girl who I know will grow up to be better than I could’ve ever been. She is perfect already.
And still, there’s a sadness inside me that I can’t immediately place. I don’t tell Pepper this, though, because it would break her heart. If I’m not happy here, now, I may never be happy.
So I just turn my head and stare at the sea again, and the familiar sting of tears pricks my eyes. I’m reminded again that I’m going soft in my age. Or maybe I’ve just seen so much violence that a little bit of peace and love seems too good to be true.
Her hand reaches down to touch mine.
“Everything is so... jumbled,” I say, after a while. “There’s too much inside my head. I don’t know how to get it out.”
She doesn’t reply, just squeezes my hand tighter.
“And some of my thoughts... I don’t know how to explain this.” I shut my eyes, concentrating. “Some of my thoughts, they’re just... hopeless. Does— does that make any sense?” I shake my head. I’m sure I’m just making things worse. I’m sure she’s just more confused.
“It makes sense.”
I know she’s just saying that. She doesn’t really understand. I nod along with it anyway, though, dropping the subject, dropping all conversation, opting into a comfortable silence instead. Quiet is always better.
I find myself wondering how I even got this far. I’ve been to other worlds, I’ve seen beings of space drop in from the sky, I’ve witnessed the largest-scale massacre in all of history, and yet I’m still here.
I’ve felt Death herself reach her hand deep into my soul, take hold of something inside, just to be torn back at the very last moment. She took a part of me with her that day on Titan. I know it. Maybe that explains the sadness I feel.
I smile, breathing in the cold, salty air once more, then follow Pepper back up the steps to the house.
—
She finds me again the next morning, sitting in the sand at the end of the pathway. It’s still cold from the night, and the sun hasn’t quite risen yet, so everything is dark. She doesn’t say anything, just sits next to me, and that seems to be enough for now.
I rest my head back against the wooden post, the one which I know has been there since man first stepped foot on this California beach, and for a moment, I wonder how many men have felt like me. Hopeless, moving with the tide like waves, because we’ve lost the energy to fight. Or maybe we know that fighting is worthless.
Depression is a funny thing, once you step back to think about it.
It doesn’t discriminate. It doesn’t care about your race, gender, social status. No. It’ll take you down even when you are the man who has everything. It’ll find you one day, after you’ve run from the life you once knew, after you’ve settled down, after you’ve got a wife and a child and a little house by the sea on the great golden coast. It will find you on America’s last frontier, as you stare at the ocean— in its unrelenting, irreverent, endless entirety— and it will sink its teeth into you just like Death did all those years ago. Except this time she will not let go.
I open my mouth to tell Pepper this, but a broken sob replaces the words I had meant to say, and I wonder when, exactly, did I start to cry. I can feel the tears now, and I bring my hands to up wipe across my cheeks even though I know it’s no use.
Stark men are made of steel, says a voice from my youth. From a time so long ago that it feels like it was in a different life. I shake my head as if shaking it at the person who said this to me, telling them, no, I don’t care anymore.
Because not caring is a wonderful thing. I reach down to hold her hand, like a lifeline, and squeeze it tight, like maybe in some way she could help rid me of the pain I feel inside.
Maybe I am crying because I know this time, Death has me beaten. She has me cornered, and I know my time is limited.
“Pepper, I love you,” I hear myself sob, and the sound is wrecked. “I-I love you. So god damn much. Y-you gave me everything, and I—“ I break off, shutting my eyes and sucking in a sharp breath. “I just w-want you to know that. Whatever happens.”
“I do know. I have always known.” Her voice is smooth, like caramel, and I know that she isn’t just saying that right now. She really knows.
I exhale, shuddering. Tears fall like raindrops, and I am powerless to stop them.
“Death has me, this time,” I try to tell her, but my voice is so wrecked that I’m not sure she can understand. “And she’s not letting go. I can feel it, Pepper.“
“You’ve fought this battle before,” she says softly, lifting her hand to wipe the tears from my cheeks. “You’ve won it. You can win it again.”
I smile weakly. She is perfect. She is my everything, and for a moment, I think that if I died while looking into her eyes, I would be okay.
“Sometimes I wish I could become the sea,” I tell her finally, choked. It doesn’t make sense, and I know it, but I tell her anyway. “It’s the only place I feel okay.”
“Then we will stay here forever,” she breathes, and I hear heartbreak in her words.
I feel like breaking down again, but I swallow thickly and hold myself together.
“Look, honey,” she whispers, taking my hand again. “Look. The sun is about to rise.”
I turn my head, staring through blurry, watery eyes at the hills past our house. The barren, rolling, layered mountains of southern California are black right now, but I can see their outline against the slowly lightening sky.
It looks like something right out of an old western painting. Or a Clint Eastwood movie. It’s then that I finally understand the beauty of desolation, of empty space and the last American frontier.
There is an old book I read, years past, as I sat up in some east coast skyscraper. It is about a man in politics who talks of life and change and love. And in it is a quote I think I will always remember:
“For West is where we all plan to go some day. It is where you go when the land gives out and the old-field pines encroach. It is where you go when you get the letter saying: Flee, all is discovered. It is where you go when you look down at the blade in your hand and the blood on it. It is where you go when you are told that you are a bubble on the tide of empire.”
So I watch the sunrise, sitting out here in the West, with the woman I love, and who loves me back just the same. I am here despite Death, who still has a grip on whatever is inside of me, and despite the piece she ripped out all those years ago. Because all is discovered. The pines have closed in. And I was but a bubble, floating helplessly in the waves, with enough wisdom to know that fighting back was worthless.
And as Pepper’s face becomes drowned in light, I think that maybe that is the point. To live despite Death and all she has done. And then I think that maybe light really is the truest magic of them all. Or perhaps the magic is Pepper.
I lean my head into her chest, breathing in the clean, soft smell of her shirt, and reveling in the fact that I am here to touch her at all.
“Morgan will be waking up soon,” I whisper. “You know how she does that sometimes. Wakes up at dawn.”
I hear Pepper laugh lightly, and part of me wants to start crying again. But I don’t. I smile instead. Because I’m alive in spite of the way Death has me cornered, and maybe now, in the light, I can find a way to stare back at her with the same malice she has shown me. And maybe then I can find a way to be happy.