We didn’t run far.
That’s the thing about Malibu when it stops pretending — there’s nowhere to flee without becoming a symbol yourself. So we walked instead. North, barefoot, along a stretch of beach that looked aggressively normal. Seaweed. Driftwood. A lost flip-flop that felt like evidence of a life still happening somewhere.
He walked beside me — him, finally unblurred by circles and projections.
Male. Solid. Annoyingly calm in the way men sometimes get when women are busy overthinking the universe.
“You’re quiet,” he said.
“I’m thinking.”
“That’s never good.”
He wasn’t wrong.
THE PROBLEM WITH STORIES THAT NOTICE YOU BACK
I had the uneasy feeling that the story was still watching us — waiting for us to re-enter its structure. Narratives hate loose ends. They prefer arcs, lessons, and redemption scenes. What we were doing now — walking without symbolic direction — felt like a literary ambush avoided at the last second.
That’s when it hit me:
Love outside the narrative is dangerous.
Not tragic-love dangerous.
Not forbidden-love dangerous.
But unsellable.
I stopped walking.
He turned to me.
“What?”
“They can’t use us like this,” I said. “No framing. No metaphor. No leverage.”
He smiled faintly.
“So we win?”
I shook my head.
“No. We just don’t get monetized.”
TWISTED JEALOUSY, WITH FOOTNOTES
The jealousy came later — it always does.
Not the cinematic kind.
The bureaucratic kind.
I thought of him — the ex-lover — the one who stayed behind when I left the earlier draft of myself. The one who learned, faster than I did, how to convert emotional wreckage into content.
He had a Substack now.
A Patreon.
Merch.
He wrote about betrayal as if it were a case study.
Tagged pain.
Optimized heartbreak for search engines.
I imagined his typing:
“What It’s Like to Love a Woman Who Chooses Chaos”
“How I Survived Being a Chapter Instead of the Ending”
Revenge dressed up as insight.
Jealousy disguised as analysis.
And I hated how effective it probably was.
He watched my face change.
“You’re thinking about him again,” he said.
“Of course I am,” I snapped. “He turned me into a content vertical.”
He laughed — not cruelly, just amused.
“You always wanted your work read.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
THE MONETIZATION PROBLEM
Here was the real fear, buried beneath the pseudo-intellectual scaffolding:
What if this — us, now — was less valuable than the pain before?
What if the world preferred my broken versions because they performed better?
I kicked at the sand.
“There’s no arc here,” I said. “No lesson. No clean ending. Just… us.”
He stopped walking and faced me fully.
“That’s the point.”
“But no one pays for that.”
He shrugged.
“Then let it be unpaid.”
It sounded noble.
It sounded impossible.
REVENGE, BUT MAKE IT BORING
Revenge, I realized, didn’t interest me anymore.
Not the dramatic kind.
Not the public kind.
The most subversive revenge would be to live a life that didn’t reference him at all.
To stop responding to the imaginary audience.
To let the blog post go unwritten.
Which terrified me.
Because who was I without the commentary?
He took my hand.
“You’re not being rewritten anymore,” he said. “You’re just being lived.”
That sentence annoyed me deeply, which meant it was probably true.
THE UNSPONSORED MOMENT
The sun dipped lower.
No skyquake.
No birds spelling omens.
No men in suits.
Just light behaving like light.
I leaned my head against his shoulder and thought about how this chapter would underperform. No hook. No villain. No algorithmic reward.
And yet — it felt like the only honest thing we’d done.
“Do you think the story will come back?” I asked.
He squeezed my hand.
“Stories always try,” he said. “But they can’t follow you everywhere.”
We kept walking.
No headline.
No call to action.
No narrative compliance.
Just two people refusing to turn their survival into content.
And somewhere behind us, I imagined the draft blinking its cursor — waiting —
before finally, mercifully, timing out.