A Study in Drowning

“I love you.” Effy pressed her forehead against his.

“I love you,” Preston said, voice wavering. “I’m so sorry it’s ruined us both.”

“The only reason anything matters is because it ends,” he says. “I wouldn’t hold you so tightly now if I thought we could be here forever.”

“That makes me want to cry.” She wished he hadn’t said it.

“I know. It’s not the most original argument, and I’m hardly the first scholar to make it—that the ephemerality of things is what gives them meaning. That things are only beautiful because they don’t last. Full moons, flowers in bloom, you. But if any of that is evidence, I think it must be true.”

Fear and pain could be endured if you knew that eventually, they would end.

“Challenging me isn’t pestering. I’m not always right. Sometimes I deserve to be challenged. And changing your mind isn’t foolish. It just means you’ve learned something new. Everyone changes their mind sometimes, as they should, or else they’re just, I don’t know, stubborn and ignorant. Moving water is healthy; stagnant water is sickly. Tainted.”

What defines a romance? All scholars seem to converge on a single point: it is a story that must have a happy ending. And why is that? I say, it is because a romance is a belief in the impossible: that anything ends happily. For the only true end is death—and in this way, is romance not a rebuke of mortality? When love is here, I am not. When love is not, I am gone. Perhaps a romance is a story with no end at all; where the end is but a wardrobe with a false back, leading to stranger and more merciful worlds.

She wondered if you could love something out of ruination, reverse that drowning process, make it all new again.

How terrible, to navigate the world without a story to comfort you

Effy laughed again. “I thought you weren’t a romantic.”

“I wasn’t,” Preston said, cheeks still pink. “Until you

You don’t have to take up a sword. Survival is bravery, too.”

What wisdom do you want from a death-marked girl? I can say only this: In the end I learned that the water was in me. It was a ghost that could not be exorcised. But a guest, even uninvited, must be attended to. You make up a bed for them. You pour from your best bottle of wine. If you can learn to love that which despises you, that which terrifies you, you can dance on the shore and play in the waves again, like you did when you were young. Before the ocean is friend or foe, it simply is. And so are you.