And one evening, alone, at dusk, I walked down to the water by myself, past the last of the tavernas to where the shoreline turns wild, and I found the rocks. The same rocks where I had sat barefoot with a dead phone and asked what is all of this for and gotten no answer. I took off my shoes again. I put my bare feet on the stone, still warm from the day, exactly as before, and I sat.
This time I did not push a phone away, because I had not brought one. I did not hold my tears at the ready deployed to no one, because there was nothing to hold. I just sat where the woman I used to be had come apart. I looked at the sea that had taught my lungs to breathe, and I breathed, easy now, no lesson required. And I said thank you to the rocks the way I could not say it to the widow's herb or the boulangère's dough, out loud, quietly, a woman thanking a pile of stone at the edge of the world for holding her once when she could not hold herself.
Then I walked back up through the town, past the alley. I glanced down it, the narrow stone throat of it where I had slid to the ground and set down eleven years, and it was just an alley now, a cool dark ordinary alley with a cat in it. And I went back to my family and my sister and the man who carried my bag, and I did not tell them where I'd been, and I did not need to.