Tides wash up on the shores of who I used to be, and seaweed garnishes what was laid bare by the crashing waves of yesterday. I relive everything in the reflection of the water’s sun-setting glow.

Kelp forests braided round rafts of sea otters as toddlers muddied their feet in the eddies, distracting me from the whitecaps on the horizon. Shorebirds whispered warnings in the wind, but who was I to heed their precautions when families needed an outing and the little Teva-clad girl graced my tidepools with her wandering eyes? The waves grew aggressive, but only in the distance–too far away to deserve a second thought. Suddenly, the lapping waves dissipated, and then returned in full force, swallowing us all like the jagged jaws of a great white. Everything I loved enveloped me in one fluid motion. Then the tidal creatures and the sand castles sank, and I was broken wreckage. No visitors approached my cavernous dunes, no hermit crabs perused the refuse of my beach. My sand slid rapidly into the murky waters as I tried to ebb away into nonexistence, one grain at a time. Tears of the incoming fog traced my follies, so the warmth of a distant sun beckoned me to heed the advice of a gray-nosed barnacle. With its voice of sandpaper echoing through a conch shell, the barnacle shouted my failings—my deteriorating mussels and weakening breakwater. The minuscule being hazardously glued to the rocks had the audacity to prescribe me a levee. Construction crews invaded—and I did my best to cooperate, I promise—but the neon construction helmets clashed so starkly with the pastel turquoise havens beyond the cement they were pouring.

Undeterred by the ghastly orange caution tape, beachcombers flooded my shores in search of peculiar flotsam. Beachcombers! The indignity of their white trash bags degraded me more than any rising sea could. Meanwhile, girls in bikinis tossed beach balls across an umbrella-embossed beach just over the mountainous ridge; I could hear echoes of their blithe raucousness. As the shorebirds began to nest in my stony crevices once again, the construction workers packed up their tools, leaving me cigarette-studded and in the care of a cast of crabs. Promising it would do me good, the crabs began to eradicate all traces of the construction project. They cut through plastic fencing with sea glass and planted mangroves to camouflage the levee’s sandbags. But to what end? With the sound of eggs cracking, I could feel my soul shatter. Is healing supposed to hurt like the roaring of a thousand storms? I was too ashamed to confess to the crabs the depths of my pain; they needed a place to live. If I was not home to crabs and anemones and urchins and snails, I was nothing. Building a rickety foundation of advice and lies, the crabs convinced themselves that I was stronger, and I guiltily played along. The shorebirds hummed songs of renewal to their nestlings as the sun emerged from the clouds, but I knew the beckoning waves behind the levee were still out of reach. There was flickering happiness in the myth of my recuperation from the tsunami, moments when the sand blurred the concrete lines enough for me to pretend a horizon lay beyond. I chose to live in those tumultuous joys and try to forget the searing agony of a million arthropod legs scuttling across the sand. 

Fleeting amnesia was a remedy soon lost to me, burrowed deep underground by a well-meaning moon snail. Perceptive and candid, the moon snail emerged from its shell, delivered a so-called truth cold as ice-tinged whitecaps, and dove back into the sands. I fear I cannot tell you what he uttered—his words are ribbons on a falling kite across the ridge—but in the sands, I have etched a list of dreams to burn: bicycles spewing breaths of seawater, waves shaping my sands like a pattern, volleyball games, campfires, children’s buckets and shovels strewn across the shore, suntans, surfboards, long, brusque beach walks, feeling okay, loving myself. The sun shone warmly on my carvings but rain still fell. Before abandoning me to salty tears and saltier consolation prizes, the moonsail entrusted me to the care of an annoyingly upbeat naturalist. He never prays and he never promises, yet he still believes. Yesterday, a family spread beach towels across my bleary sands and explored tidal pools teeming with life. Today, the levee will break down; my boardwalks are embossed with sunset orange.

Tomorrow, the ocean will carefully caress my shore, and a toddler will waddle out into the waves and yelp with joy as her feet are stung by the cold of the seawater and the salting breeze. The sun shines brightly.