Gunnar

The old lighthouse keeper had seen forty-three winters pass along that rocky coastline, each one carving new lines into his weathered face like tide pools etched into stone. He kept a journal not of storms or shipwrecks, but of the small things: the particular shade of orange the sky turned before rain, the stray cat that visited every third Tuesday, the way his coffee tasted different depending on which direction the wind blew. Some nights he'd climb the spiral stairs just to watch the beam s weep across empty water, thinking about all the ships that never came and all the ones that, thankfully, never needed him at all.