What the Tide Remembers

The tide does not return to the same shore. It finds a shore that only looks the same, the sand rearranged by wind since morning, a boot print filled, a name smoothed from the mud.

Still it comes back the way grief comes back— not as the thing itself but as its shape, the negative space where something warm had been, the hollow that the hand remembers first.

I used to think the ocean kept a record: every shell it swallowed, every bell that rang once from a buoy and went quiet. But the water forgets. That is why it moves.

We are the ones who hold the catalog— the weight of fog, the color of that summer, the specific silence after the door closed. The sea just goes on being beautiful and cold.

And maybe that is enough— to witness without keeping, to touch the dark water and let it take your reflection out to sea.