What the Tide Leaves Behind

The sea pulls back each morning like a sentence left unfinished, dragging its hem across the sand in that cold, indifferent way of things that do not grieve.

What it leaves: a mussel's blue-black shell, a length of rope gone soft with brine, the ghost-print of a wave pressed flat and fading in the hour before it dries.

I have stood here thinking of your voice — how it carried the same pattern, arriving full, then narrowing, then only the wet impression of it cooling in the air.

The sandpipers run the waterline as if distance were a game, as if there were always time to dart back before the next wave comes. There isn't. There never was.