Summer ended in silence.
Not the peaceful kind.
The kind that creeps in like fog across the hills—soft, slow, and heavy.
The kind that makes everything look the same,
but feel different.

There was no final campfire.
No porch full of laughter.
No loud goodbyes or last-night chaos.

Just a storm.

The kind that settles over the mountain like a sigh.
Not loud. Not violent.
Just steady. Aching.
Like the sky itself was grieving.

And maybe it was.
Maybe it was mourning the end of what we carried all season.
Maybe it was finally letting go of the weight we never said out loud.

Because that storm—
It didn’t just fall.
It washed.
It bled through the cracks we’d patched too quickly.
It soaked through the spaces we never had time to feel.
And it left everything raw.

The road glistened.
The fields were quiet.
The mountain felt hollow.

Like it had been wrung out.

And maybe we had been, too.

Because this summer—
It cost us.

It cost late nights and early mornings.
It cost cracked hands and tired knees.
It cost pretending we were fine when we weren’t.
It cost silence from people we trusted to see us.
It cost the versions of ourselves we had to become just to survive.

And when it was over,
when the last walkie call faded and the last goodbye didn’t come,
there was only the storm.

Only the rain carving lines down the windows like tears we never had time to cry.
Only the sky, bruised with light, like it, too, had been holding everything in.

But after the storm, the mountain looked different.

Cleaner.
Emptier.
More honest.

Like it had stopped pretending.

And maybe that’s what endings really are—
not neat, not pretty.
But necessary.
A reckoning.
A chance to exhale everything we held too long.

It still hurts.
The shift.
The quiet.
The ache of not hearing your name over the radio.
The porch light that stays off.
The room that no longer smells like sweat and bug spray and sleep deprivation.

But healing doesn’t always come gently.
Sometimes it comes like a storm.
Sometimes it strips everything bare.
Sometimes it doesn’t ask permission.
It just breaks you open,
so something softer can grow.

And when it passes,
you’re not the same.

The mountain isn’t either.

But maybe,
maybe that’s the point.