Skipping Stones

The crunch of snow under our boots is deafening in the still winter air. It’s over. Both of us know, but we haven’t said a word. There’s just a feeling. A quiet, awkward, sadness.

The snow on the trail is more like ice, sharp and brittle. Everything is cold, and dry, and dead on this path. It feels like it should be a metaphor for this moment, but it doesn’t. It feels fragile and delicate like soft snowflakes powdering the night sky. Like I could lay down and let it slowly bury me.

The trail breaks free of the trees and we arrive at a large frozen pond. I walk down to where the frozen water meets the dirt. I tap the ice with the toe of my boot. “Is it frozen solid?” I ask, breaking the reverential silence.

“Not all the way to the bottom, but enough to walk on safely,” he says, hands balled into his coat pockets. He had stopped at the end of the trail and the distance between us feels foreign. This morning we woke up in the same bed, limbs draped around each other, and now we’re like two magnets repelling. Like even if we wanted to get closer, the physics of the universe would prevent it.

How did we get here? I’m still unsure.

“Have you ever skipped a rock across a frozen pond?” he asks.

I shake my head before realizing he hasn’t looked at me since we stopped. “No, Arizona kid, remember? Not a lot of frozen ponds around.”

The bed and breakfast in winter seemed dreamy when we booked it. Watching the snow fall, curling up with oversized mugs of tea, just the two of us. It was a desert kid’s dream.

I watch him as he searches the ground for a rock. He picks up a flat gray stone and tosses it in his hands a few times. He leans back and with a flick of his wrist the rock launches across the ice.

The electronic sound that reverberates back to us surprises me. I let out a single laugh. “What?”

He grins and tosses another one. It makes a ‘womp-womp-womp-wompwompwomp’ noise until it’s becomes a singular undulating noise.

“What causes that? It sounds like a laser?”

He shrugs, his gaze pointed over the pond. “Something about the sound waves passing through the ice and separating the high and low frequencies.” He throws another rock and whatever awkwardness exists between us dissipates. I cross the distance and start looking for a rock. “Here,” he bends and picks up a flat brown rock and places it in my hand.

I chuck the rock and it makes a noise pulled straight out of a sci-fi movie. I laugh and he’s looking at me with a giant smile. “More,” is all I say and we both turn our gazes down to the ground, searching for more rocks.

I pick up a handful and so does he and we take turns skipping our rocks across the ice. “Who do you think can skip farther?” I ask.

He gives me a look through his brows and counts to three. We throw our rocks and out of sheer luck, mine goes two extra skips. “Ha! In your face,” I laugh, giving him a slight shove. He catches my arm and pulls me to him.

We’re chest to chest for a moment before I look up at him. He’s smiling, and so close. Yesterday this would have been the most normal thing in the world, but today...it isn’t. We both have smiles stretched across our faces, but mine slowly drops. I feel the light go out of my eyes first, then the smile shrinks until my mouth wavers. The tears fill my eyes and even though we’re standing close, he pulls me tighter.

“It’ll be okay,” he whispers into my hair.

“How?” I gasp out. How is any of this okay? We love each other. There wasn’t some large destruction, some betrayal or intense fight. We had a minor disagreement, and we both just knew. After two years together, this is how it ends. On a frozen pond, void of any life, in the cold winter air. In this moment, it doesn’t have the slow hypothermic feeling from five minutes ago. It feels like the harsh, road rash feeling of falling down on ice.

He gives me a long kiss on my forehead, and it breaks my heart. “Let’s head back,” is all he says, and I give a nod into his chest.

We’ll walk back to the bed and breakfast, we’ll pack our belongings and we’ll spend the rest of the day driving back to our shared apartment in strained silence. How do you break up as adults who live together? Who gets the apartment? Where does the other one go? I’m unsure, but I know we’ll have to figure it out soon.

As we trudge through the icy path all I can think is, I wish I would have known. I wish I would have been able to appreciate the way his arms held me in the night. How we slept stretched out across each other in a tangle of random limbs, but were never uncomfortable. How easy everything felt between us and how much we loved each other.

But sadly, love isn’t always enough.