What the Tide Remembers

The tide pulls back its syllables, leaving sand-written words we almost read— shells arranged like a grammar only the current understands.

We walk the line where things dissolve, where solid becomes suggestion. The water takes what we offer: footprints, shadows, the names we've whispered into the salt-bright afternoon.

It all returns, differently. The shells come back broken, reformed. The sand remembers the shape of every wave that ever found it, carries those stories in its grain.

We think we're the ones who remember, but the ocean knows better— it keeps what matters in the turn of each small stone, the alphabet of foam that writes itself again and again on the same shore.