What the Tide Leaves Behind

The sea does not remember what it has touched — only the land holds the proof, smoothed stones like old arguments worn to silence.

A child digs a moat and the tide fills it in with the same indifference a year uses to cover its own tracks.

I have stood at the margin where salt erases everything it loves — the footprints, the castles, the careful names written where the water reaches.

What remains is the reaching: the long, bright unraveling of a wave across sand, how it gives everything going back.