What the Tide Leaves

The sea does not ask permission to reclaim what it lent. It moves through you the way forgetting does— not cruel, just indifferent to what you'd named as yours.

A child's shoe on the wet sand. A word you almost said at the hospital. The specific weight of a hand that no longer reaches back.

What remains is not absence but the shape around it: the dent in the pillow, the coffee cup on the wrong side of the sink, the silence that has learned to breathe.

Come evening, the tide turns again. It brings back kelp and lost things— nothing you were waiting for, everything the ocean chose to give.