The Sound the Ocean Made

didn’t expect the ocean to be so quiet.

It was late April, off-season, and the little coastal town was mostly empty. Shops were closed, windows shuttered. Only the gulls and the wind kept company with the waves. It was exactly what I wanted—silence.

I rented the same cottage my parents had taken me to every summer until I was seventeen. Back then, it had seemed magical—shells in the sand, bonfires, salt on your lips that didn’t come from tears. Now it felt like an echo of something I didn’t quite believe in anymore.

The cottage was smaller than I remembered. Or maybe I had just grown. That happens, doesn’t it? You return to something and it no longer fits.

Like people.

Like love.

I’d come to forget him. That was the truth. I told my friends I needed a break, a chance to clear my head and write again. They believed me. Sort of.

He’d left three months earlier.

Said he didn’t feel like “himself” anymore. That he needed to “explore.” Words like that—vague, soft, designed to inflict the least amount of pain. But pain isn’t something you can soften. It either cracks you open or closes you off. I still wasn’t sure which one I was.

Every morning, I walked the beach with coffee in a chipped mug I found in the kitchen. The same mug my mom used to drink from. I traced its familiar curve with my thumb, watching the waves rise and break and fall again. Predictable. So unlike us.

It was the third morning when I heard it—faint, distant, buried beneath the crash of the tide.

Music.

Not from a speaker. Not from a car.

From the water.

I stood still, letting the breeze whip my hair into knots. A piano melody—soft, slow, haunting. Familiar.

I followed it.

Down the beach, past the jetty, to the place where the land curved in like a question mark. And there, half-buried in the sand, was an old cassette player.

I stared at it. Pressed the "stop" button.

Silence.

Pressed "play."

The music returned—low, warm, and aching with memory.

It was the song he played the first night we kissed. The one we danced to in the living room when the power went out. The one he said reminded him of “everything good that hurts.”

I knelt beside it, my hand trembling. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

Could it?

I looked around. No one. Just dunes and sky and the endless rhythm of the sea.

The cassette had no label. Just a piece of masking tape with the word “still” written in faded ink.

I carried the player back to the cottage. Played it again. And again.

I didn’t cry.

That night, I dreamed of him. Not the version that left, but the one who made me laugh so hard my ribs ached. The one who carried our cat in his coat during storms. The one who believed in forever, even if he couldn’t stay for it.

The next morning, the player was gone.

In its place, a single shell rested on the porch railing. Pale blue, smooth, unbroken.

I never saw anyone. Never heard the music again. But I kept the shell.

And when I returned home two weeks later, I felt something had changed.

Not in the world. In me.

He still existed. But he no longer haunted.

Some loves come to stay.

Others come to shape you—and then leave.

But all of them leave echoes.

And sometimes, if you’re quiet enough, the ocean plays them back.

Author's Note:

Healing rarely happens the way we expect. Sometimes, it comes in the form of strange music, forgotten places, and the realization that the past can’t be rewritten—but it can be released.