0 March Secret Agent #28

TITLE: Miss You, Love You
GENRE: Contemporary YA

Once, six girls sat on the shore of the Pacific Ocean, at the start of the earth and the end of it. They perched there where fog met sea and foam met sand and old met new, and it seemed to them they felt the world shift. It was opening up to them, but as it did, it was pulling them apart.

So that night as the sun went down, they promised themselves to stay the same. The ocean took their promise and carried it out to sea in a single wave, out to where it could break against the horizon and be scooped up by the universe. And it was as if the ocean brought a promise back to them, a promise of constancy. A reminder that some things, like water and earth and love, could endure. The waves would keep rolling, and if they could, so could the six friends.

They had returned here, to this shore of their adolescence, many times over the last few years. Sitting there, six silhouettes against the setting sun, it was easy to think things had stayed the same. They imagined their friendship preserved in the water, indelible.

But you can’t drop something into the ocean and expect it to come out unchanged. The summer their promise resurfaced, they didn’t realize it. But that’s because they were looking for the constants. They wanted the predictable tide of the ocean, not its capricious, mercurial swells. They looked toward the future, but they didn’t see it at all.