Mia’s Goodbye to Brian

In a small coastal town where the fog clings to the trees like memory to grief, Mia Halbrook walks the winding path toward the lighthouse where Brian used to spend his days. A year has passed since he vanished during a storm that wrecked the cliffs and scattered debris for miles. Everyone said he was gone — the sea had claimed him. But Mia never believed it. Every night, she heard his voice in her dreams, soft and distant, always saying the same thing: “I’m still waiting.” Haunted but hopeful, she returns to the old lighthouse, now boarded and condemned, determined to face whatever truth lingers in the echoes of the past.

As Mia unlocks the rusted door, time seems to bend. The air thickens, the silence deepens, and the air tastes like the memory of rain. Inside, everything is just as Brian left it — his journal open on the desk, a cup of cold coffee beside it, and a polaroid of them pinned to the wall, untouched by dust. The journal's last page, dated the night he disappeared, reads: “The tide calls louder tonight. If I go missing, know that it wasn’t the storm.” As she turns each page, Mia feels a presence grow stronger. The lighthouse pulses with emotion — grief, longing, and something ancient that doesn’t belong in the world of the living.

Then, in the beam room high above the rocks, she sees him. Not a ghost — not fully. Brian stands in the fading light, his eyes hollow but familiar, as if caught between two realities. Mia doesn’t scream. She walks to him, steady but trembling. He tells her of the moment he fell — not from the cliffs, but through a fracture in time. The storm had opened a rift, and he had been pulled into a liminal space where the sea never stops and the stars don’t move. There, time doesn’t flow — it loops. He has lived that storm over and over, calling to her across dreams, waiting for the moment she’d return. Only her presence, her letting go, can set him free.

In the final moments, Mia must make a choice: to stay in the loop with him forever, suspended in a memory of love and sorrow, or to break the cycle by finally saying goodbye. With tears streaming, she kisses his fading form and whispers, “I love you… but you’re not mine to keep.” The lighthouse begins to tremble. Brian smiles — truly smiles — for the first time in a year, and the loop collapses in a burst of sea wind and light. Mia awakens on the beach, the lighthouse crumbled behind her. In her hand is Brian’s journal — now with a new final page: “Thank you for letting me go.”