Tidal Memory

Water remembers what we forget— each grain of sand a small erasure, the tide sketching its ancient patterns across the hollow of the beach.

We leave our footprints in the wet dark, confident they will persist, but the ocean has other plans. It smooths away our urgency, our names, makes palimpsests of our moments.

There is kindness in this forgetting. The waves don't judge what they erase— only move, only return, only move again with their patient breath.

Sometimes I think I understand why shells break into smaller pieces. It is not a tragedy but a spreading, a dispersal, the way becoming many is its own wholeness.

The tide comes in. It always does. It takes what we offer and transforms it into something we cannot recognize, and we call that forgetting, though perhaps it is only translation.