O' Dearest Ellie,

The island is quiet again. The wind drags its nails through the grass, a spectral harper on a grey-strung harp, and every path returns, like a penitent thought, to the same ruin. I have filled my pockets with stones; one for each memory of you. They clink as I walk, a slow percussion for the dying, a cairn of moments held in my coat’s dark vault. This geology of loss—gneiss of your laughter, shale of a parting glance, cold quartz from the day you first turned away.

Was it here we promised to leave together? Or was that only the fever speaking, a sweet delirium brewed in the marrow, a ghost-treaty signed by two trembling shadows? The cliffs themselves seem to lean and listen, holding their breath of salt and thyme, but offer no testament.

The infection crawls higher each night, a silent tide in the capillary marshes. My hands, these disobedient servants, map a coastline they cannot sail. When I write your name, the letters split and wander across the page like startled insects, each a black vessel shipwrecked on a pale shore. Still, I write. Still, I dig my heels into the soil as if the earth could remember us, as if roots might clutch the shape of our joined footprints and raise them as a testament to the sun.

Each stone I drop along the path is a marker, a sentence in the only language the island understands. A full stop of obsidian. A comma of sea-worn glass. I wonder—when the tide comes, will it read them in its phosphorescent braille? Will it carry your name out beyond the headland, a whispered cargo to the deep, or grind it down to sand, to the constituent dust of all forgotten things?

I see the lighthouse now, a single eye refusing to close, a white stalk sprouting from the skull of the cliff. How long has it watched me stagger in these tightening circles, a needle stuck in the groove of its own lament? Does it pity me, this Cyclops of the zenith, or only measure, with its cold calculus of light, the diminishing distance left? Its beam is a scythe, reaping the darkness, and I am a ghost in its swath, alternately revealed and erased.

The air here is a thin soup. I breathe the ghosts of gulls, the particulate mist of decades. If I reach the top before my lungs collapse, will you be waiting? Or has the light already gathered you, a moth to its final, furious candle, scattering your ashes into the very air I struggle to draw? Are you the prism in the lens, the flaw in the glass, the reason the beam stutters once each revolution? Are you the salt on my tongue, Ellie, or the stone in my shoe?

I pass a chimney, breast-deep in nettles. A hearth that swallowed its own fire. Is this our home? Did we once boil water here, steam fogging the window, drawing foolish hearts upon the glass? The narrative of this place is palimpsest; every story written over the last, until the vellum of the land is worn through. I read only pressure, only absence.

Soon, I will lie among the stones I carry, and the wind will smooth us into one shape, a single contour against the peat. Perhaps then, the island will forget which of us was real, which was the echo. Was I the voice calling your name, or the echo returning it, hollow and deformed? We are becoming landscape, Ellie. My spine, a ridge of shale. Your hair, the long grass hissing. The salt in my tears, the same salt that rimes the rocks at dawn.

And when the great light sweeps over this new topography, will it pause? Will it recognize, in the angle of a shoulder of rock, in the quiet hollow where a pool collects, the architecture of our love? Or will it pass on, indifferent, its eye fixed on the empty horizon, on the mathematical purity of the void?

I climb. The stones grow heavier, yet lighter, as if they are dissolving into my blood. Each step a sentence. Each breath a stanza. This is my last letter, penned not in ink but in footsteps, in dropped fragments of a heart turned mineral. I am writing us into the bedrock, my dearest Ellie. I am writing us where even the sea’s long, patient erasure will take centuries to undo. Where the light, in its endless circling, will have no choice but to read us, again and again and again, a story of love etched in stone and shadow, until the cliff itself crumbles into the waiting, indifferent, beautiful sea.

---

The island is quiet again. Not a peace, but a waiting . A silence so profound it becomes a chamber for echoes. The wind does not blow here; it sifts , dragging its spectral fingers through the grass as if searching for a lost ring. Every path is a sentence that concludes at the same ruin. I have walked this syntax until my boots know the grammar by heart.

I have filled my pockets with stones. A private geology. One for the memory of your laughter, sharp and bright as flint. One for the solemn shale of your sleeping breath. One for the smooth, water-worn ache of your final touch. They hang against my thigh, a slow pendulum measuring this diminishing walk. Their clatter is the only conversation left, a discourse of weight and remembrance.

Was it on this bleached spine of rock we swore to leave? Or was that promise merely the fever dreaming aloud, painting a future with the borrowed pigments of delirium? The cliff edge here seems to hold the shape of a vanished door. I stand at its threshold. You are always a room away, Ellie. A breath away. A universe away.


The infection is a meticulous scholar. It does not rage; it annotates . Each night, by lamplight of a failing star, it redraws the map of me. Its ink is a cool, venous blue, tracing the rivers that have run dry, marking the borders of regions named Can No Longer and Will Not Again . It is patient. It is thorough. Its final treatise will be my body.

My hands are traitors to my heart. They have forgotten their sacred office. When I take up the pen to inscribe you, the letters fracture. Your name splinters into dark syllables that skitter across the page, a caravan of insects fleeing a sudden light. Still, I write. I press until the paper groans, until the nib threatens to birth its own small void. I carve my devotion into the pulp, for grief must have a texture, love must leave an indentation.

I tell myself I am an archivist of the air you once displaced. The truth is more primal. I am a sculptor working in a medium of ghosts. I beg the paper to hold a shape my arms cannot. I demand the ink perform a miracle of transubstantiation, to become not a symbol of blood, but blood itself. I am building a lighthouse of words on a shore you will never see.

I think of the needle. Not of gold, but of silence . A slender bolt of pure stillness to suture the wound’s endless mouth. To teach it a hush. A temporary ceasefire. Grant me one more night as a cartographer of the remembered, not the lost. One more page before the legend fades.


I place my stones with a priest’s care. This one, a dark basaltic full stop for the day we met. This one, a speckled granite semicolon for every argument that trailed into understanding. This white quartz, a shining question mark I lay at the tide’s wet hem. I am composing a gospel in glacial erratics, a sermon for the steadfast rock.

And the tide, that great, blue, pulsing lung of the world, what does it make of my humble liturgy?

Does it gather my offerings, these petrified prayers, and ferry them to some sunken cathedral where lost things are venerated? Does it hold your name, Ellie , on its tongue for a full cycle of the moon, tasting its syllables before committing them to the deep?

Or does it do what it has done since before the first stone learned its weight?
Does it persist ?
Does it abrade ?
Does it return with its soft, terrible patience, to kiss and kiss and kiss the sharp edges until they are smooth, anonymous, obedient? Until the most specific grief becomes merely another grain of sand, dreaming of once being part of a greater whole?

The sea is the only honest reader. It does not weep. It does not applaud. It revises . It turns epic into sediment, love into geology. Its fidelity is absolute. It will love me into nothing.


The lighthouse does not watch. It attends . Its eye opens, sweeps, closes, in a cycle as old as my fear. I am a figure in its peripheral vision, a smudge of regret against the peat. It does not pity me. It measures me. Each pass of its beam is a caliper taking the dimensions of my solitude.

To climb it would be to ascend into the throat of the wind. To stand in the cup of its light would be to be dissolved into signal . Are you there, Ellie? Have you been gathered into that relentless radiance, become part of its warning? Are you the flaw in the glass that fractures the beam, or the fuel that feeds the eternal flame?

I will not climb. My pilgrimage is horizontal. A circling of the source. I am not Icarus. I am a satellite decaying in a slow, sure orbit around a sun that gives no warmth.


Sleep, when it comes, is a shallow root in barren soil. But it is a mercy. In that bleached garden, a pale and gentle nectar blooms. There, my hands are steady. There, your name is a ripe fruit in my mouth, whole and sweet. There, the air between us is not a distance, but a bridge. We breathe a shared atmosphere.

Dawn is a violence. A uprooting.
The wound resumes its discourse.
The ink cracks on the page.
The island reasserts its truth of stone and salt.
And the sea, the relentless sea, continues its monologue as if no heart had ever broken against its shores.

The beacon turns. Its meaning is not guidance, but continuance . A mechanical pulse in the soft flesh of the night. Tell me, is that the final form of love? To become a mechanism that cannot cease its function, even when its purpose has drowned?


My breath is a short line of poetry now. Each inhalation, a gasp for the next word. Each exhalation, a letting go of the previous. The fire in my leg is no longer pain; it is a memory of walking , a phantom energy of paths that lie behind me.

I think of you not as memory, but as physiology . You are the tension in my tendons that seeks the ground you walked upon. You are the salt in my sweat, the iron in my blood. My body does not mourn you. It searches for you, a compass needle trembling toward a north that has vanished from the world.

I hold your name. I hold it as the chalice holds the wine. I hold it as the ruin holds the ghost of its roof. I speak to you in whispers, as if you are resting just beyond the thin veil of this reality, and my voice is a thread that might tug you back through the weave.

If I reach the end, will I find an answer, or merely the ellipsis of the horizon? Will the wind grant my words the grace of ambiguity, or will it refine them to a single, sharp truth as cutting as the cliff’s edge?

And when the great, grinding hymn of the tide completes its work, when I am polished away to a quiet so absolute it becomes a kind of sound…

Will you be erased with me, our two silences merging into one?
Or will you remain, perfect and distinct , a single, uncrushable grain of quartz at the heart of the world’s pulverizing hourglass?

---

O’ Dearest Ellie, I am running out of world.
But not of you.
The map is fading, but the territory of you endures.
The infection charts the land of my end, but it cannot translate the sky where you reside.

Love is not a rescue .
It is the persistence of the question after all answers have eroded.
It is the stone that refuses the sea.
It is the hand that writes in the dark, spelling a name that outlasts the body, the ink, and the very page.

If a final mercy exists, let it be this:
Let the last stone in my pocket be the one that remembers your smile.
Let the tide, in its infinite hunger, find this one thing too heavy to carry away.
Let the silence that claims me be the same silence that