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I could hear the wind whistling through the cave as I stood on the ledge. One more step and I’d be back for the first time since that day.
My back was pressed against the cliff side, my fingers running over the rocks behind me. The first full moon of autumn had brought uncharacteristically cold air that nipped at my cheeks and nose. The harbor was choppy today, and the sea beyond it even worse; glimpses of the wrath of Idros visible in the spray that flew over the breakwall. But the sun shone, and I knew that it was a matter of time before the lights came alive inside the cave.
Just do it. Just walk in.
It wasn’t the first time I had stood in this exact position in this exact spot, listening for an answer in the waves. “Go,” they seemed to call to me. I stepped around the corner.
A silence that was louder than the crash of the waves pushed in on me as I beheld this little slice of my past.You are okay. You are okay. You are okay.I closed my eyes, wishing to hear his voice, wishing to smell the smoke and cedar, but nothing came. Nothing but stale air and cold and heartache.
“You’re not here,” I whispered, the weight of reality sinking into my chest. It was going to crush me. “I need you, and you’re not here.” I moved to the middle of the cave and stared up at the crystals still cloaked in shadow. “You’re not here! Why did you have to go?!” I let myself hit the floor, the same spot where he had laid me down. Where I realized I was going to fall in love with him. Where I thought to myself that maybe I already had.
The lights started then, the harbor’s furious movements causing the glimmers to sprint back and forth across the cave erratically. I closed my eyes and let them wash over me, let the tears flood my eyes, let myself remember him. I had never let myself wonder if he had thought of me in his last moments, never breathed life into the possibility that he had or hadn’t. I suspected both would be just as painful, just as heart wrenching, just as devastating.
I opened my eyes again when I knew the lights had ceased, gone back to live in their crystals until tomorrow came. My head fell to the side, facing the rock we sat on the first day he brought me here. I tried to make his figure materialize, tried to find his outline in the cave wall, but it was no use. I rolled onto my side, content to lay in my misery, but something caught my eye. There was something dark behind the boulder, something that didn’t seem to belong.
I rose and shuffled over to see whatever it was neatly folded and tucked between the rock and the wall of the cave. Did anyone else know about this cave? Did someone leave something here? I grabbed it, the fabric falling open, and as I unfolded it, I saw… Two buttons and a tie.
It couldn’t be.
I didn’t want to turn it over in my hands, to look for the little flaw that would tell me what it was, but my hands were moving to the hem.
A small tear with frayed edges.
It was my Da’s cloak.
