What the Tide Leaves Behind

The sea rehearses forgetting every morning, dragging its chalk lines back across the sand, unwriting the names of boats, the shallow graves of shells.

By noon the shore is blank again, patient as any surface that has learned to receive without holding.

Still, something stays— not in the sand but in the body watching it: the cold weight of salt air in the chest, the eye's ache from too much silver.

We call it memory but it lives in muscle, not mind. The wrist that learned to cast a line. The heel that knows the give of wet rock.

Go back after years and the coast will not know you. But your hands will remember how to be careful, how to walk without asking the ground for guarantees.