The Depths of Goodbye

The emerald sea had spread light upon the curved window of the submerged suite, creating ripples upon the ceiling as the strokes of a frenzied god.

Luna Caulfield walked the floor without shoes on; her breath stopped in hiccups. Around the room, there rang a silence, save for the gentle vibration of water rubbing at the walls. Max had been off for fifteen minutes, perhaps twenty. Enough for her thoughts to unravel the way a thread caught on coral might. It was his idea: a surprise, grand gesture—a hotel under the water, near the coast of Malta. "An escape," he'd called it. But Luna did not want an escape. She wanted clarity.

She rubbed the column of her neck where the tension had settled and a dull ache. "This isn't it," she whispered, and her voice dissolved into the muted silence. "This isn't us. This isn't me."

Something leaped by the window from the side of her eyes, a slur of red, a swirl of bubbles, a comet-human descending.

Luna was startled back, her intake of breath caught in her throat.

It was Max. Of course, it was Max.

He floated there like a cartoon Valentine made flesh. Heart-shaped scuba mask. Red trunks covered with glittering gold letters writing Love me forever. Beneath his oxygen tank, a couple of decrepit angel wings bobbed, lifeless and ridiculous.

In one hand he had a laminated sheet. In the other: a ring box.

"Oh no," Luna mumbled, placing a hand on her forehead.

Max pointed the sign at the glass, grinning through his regulator.

LUNA, YOU'RE MY EVERYTHING. LIKE, LITERALLY. WITHOUT YOU, I'D SINK.

As proof, here's a rock.

MARRY ME?

He opened the box dramatically. The sunlit ring took the filtered sunlight and refracted it just like a lighthouse beacon. The stone was enormous—obscenely so. Luna wasn't even sure if it was a diamond. It somewhat resembled quartz torn from a cliff.

The deep behind Max unfurled like a mystery, vast and welcoming. Her face in the glass was superimposed with his; his certainty next to her uncertainty.

She mumbled, "no," before she could check herself.

Max furrowed his brows. His hands faltered.

Luna made a step forward and pressed her palm to the glass. "I can't," she said, even as she knew he couldn't hear her. "I love that you tried. I just don't… I don't want this."

Max hung there, blinking, behind the mask, paralyzed as if a bubble from a bottle of amber.

Luna sighed and faced away from the glass. She leaned her back against it, whispering tremulously. "Perhaps I dreamed that if I waited long enough, I would become enamored of the idea of us. Of safety. But I want more. I won't risk it. I like the unknown. You—you, Max—you always wanted a place in life. I need a life where life is in motion.

Behind her, the water stirred.

A thud. Then another. She spun around.

Max was banging his hand on the window, and wild panic was written all over his body. His eyes were big, his mouth agape under the regulator. A gray blur divided the sea behind him.

Again, Luna's breath was caught, not in emotion, this time.

A shark. Fast, too close, too real.

It lunged.

Max disappeared in a swirl of silver and red. His limbs flailed once, twice. The regulator went forth like a cork has been blown in the wake of wasted bubbles. The sign he'd pressed to the glass fell like confetti in a war zone.

"No," Luna murmured, hand over her mouth. "No, no, no—"

But it was already happening.

The ocean turned crimson. The box containing the ring turned in a slow pirouette next to an arm that was no longer part of its owner. The shark, filled and uninterested, faded away into the void, leaving only dying chaos in his wake.

Luna sank to her knees. Not grief per se — but from the weight of what she had just seen, from how complete everything had become.

"I was going to put you off kindly," she whispered.' Tell you we could still be friends. Tell you I needed time to know who I was without you. But life… life just answered for both of us.

The proposal, as laminated, floated by the window, half torn and curled at the corners. An icy puff of red stained the ocean as if there was lipstick on a collar.

Luna dried her tears, and she stood.

It was not the end she had pictured. But it still was an ending.

And endings – however sharp – were also beginnings.

When she left the room, she did so barefoot, burdenless, light.

The ocean behind her guarded its secrets.