Chapter Text
My Dearest Meredith,
In another lifetime you'd have heard it from me years ago. You would know it was true with every beat of your heart. Every inch of your skin would know it. I’d have given you everything. In another lifetime repression and cowardice wouldn’t have run in my blood, and I’d have told the world from the beginning. About who I am, the way I love. About the way you made me feel. In another lifetime maybe, just maybe, it could have been us.
But there isn't another lifetime. There is only this one.
And everyday I feel more and more that it was wasted on me.
I remember seeing your body devoid of life, the day that you died. I remember how pale you were, true paper white, like your soul had been pulled right out of you and taken by the tides that had fought to claim you. Even in death you were angelic. Even as your soul drifted and tried to drag you with it, still you were the most present and authentic person I’d ever met. You always were. You were fresh air in a sea of faces all trying to be someone they weren't. You were just you. Though flawed and hurting, you were you. Still standing despite your pain, the weight of the world and a thousand expectations on your shoulders couldn't stop the way you would float into people’s orbits, changing them forever.
You challenged me, Meredith. You infuriated me, occupied so much of my mind with what I thought for so long was jealousy. You drove me to madness. But there amongst my madness was this inexplicable truth: I was feeling again. The first time in a long time, truly feeling. Feeling broke me open, forced me to stand face to face with all I had suppressed. You have that effect on people, Mer. You always carried this sort of magic around you. I swear Meredith, you enter a room and the energy changes. You are magnetic. You were everything.
You always have been.
And yet still you felt it once, this feeling. The need to leave, the sense of inadequacy that weighed your legs down like lead, sinking you further and further in the depths of the bay. That tide, the icy water claiming you, every time that you had been kicked down further by the ones who were meant to hold you up ringing in your ears like a siren song. You knew where you were, I know it. You knew you were supposed to be fighting.
“She knows how to swim,” he’d said. “She’s a good swimmer.”
And in that moment, I knew. Me and you? We were not so different after all.
Even then all I wanted was to hold you, and if my body had let me do anything but stare, if I could have willed myself to move closer, say anything, I know I would've. I have this nightmare sometimes, and in it I'm right back there in that moment when I first saw you so close to death, walking to you, temporarily paralysed by the sight of you. The coldest river rushes down the hallway, breaking down the door, sweeping them all away and leaving only us, separated by the current, your bed now unreachable. I wade in, try to fight my way across but it's too strong. I see a woman, she looks just like me but braver, and she catches my eye. Her hands are intertwined with yours and she brings them to her lips, kisses them over and over. She turns to me, screams across the river as the monitors flatline, barely audible across the sounds of the rushing water.
“It was now, or never.”
Everytime I wake from it I can't bring myself to think anything other than “she was right”.
That was the moment. That was the day I should've stepped up. I never so much as reached for your hand and yet I feel it sometimes, when it's dark and I lose myself in the depth of my regrets the way I sometimes do in the early hours. False memories, flashes of that cold lifeless skin, frozen fingers entwined with my own.
How did it feel, to be the one frozen? Part of me wonders if it was peaceful, once the fight had left and you were sinking further down. Was it quiet? Was it a relief? And when your body was warm and dry and the miracle took place that filled those once frozen lungs with air once more, when that magic heart of yours beat so hard in your chest like you'd never even been dead at all, did it feel like mercy? A watery salvation? Or did it feel like failure?
Mer, I’m so sorry.
I know you've been abandoned time and time again, as have I, and I know that pain. I’m unsure if you think of me often these days, or ever at all. But if it hurts to lose another then for that I am more sorry than you could ever imagine. I am years late I know, too many years, and whether I’ll even send this letter I'm not certain. I just knew I couldn't go without letting the truth, our truth, exist outside of my head even once. Even if just on paper.
Meredith Grey, it was you I wanted to fight for, you I should've stayed for.
You that I loved.
Take care, don't you dare go cold again.
Maybe in our next life,
Addie.