What the Tide Keeps

The shore has no loyalty— it gives back what it wants to give back, smoothed glass and the split halves of shells, nothing you could call yours.

My grandmother kept a jar of such things on the windowsill beside her bed. She never said where they came from. I think she forgot. I think that was the point.

The tide is a sentence that revises itself every six hours, crossing out the footprints, leaving the rocks with their cold wet grammar to say it again.

What we carried here— the argument, the name said wrong, the drive home in silence— the water smooths it the way a tongue smooths a loose tooth: not gone, just smaller, just bearable.

By morning the beach is blank again, a page we pretend we haven't read. We walk out onto it anyway, leaving new marks, waiting for the tide to be kind.