Tidal Forces

On the beach, a ghost crab scuttles sideways,dragging a stolen chip bag toward its borrowed home.

Dolphins thread through black water,

their echolocation mapping the deep in ways I never will.

I think how sea creatures don’t carry any stuff with them,

how the tide erases every wrong turn,

no footprints left to betray hesitation.

I remember sacred geometry

in drawn spirals on the back of a receipt,

he told me every spiral contains its own logic,

that the universe unfurls in predictable ratios—

fibonacci sequences in pinecones, in snail shells, in the way

my son outgrew his shoes overnight.

I nodded, pretending I didn’t feel

the precise weight of time pressing against my spine.

In the kitchen, I lift a skillet, feel the grip settle into my palm—

muscle memory built from a thousand small rituals:

the quick twist of a pepper grinder,

the scrape of a spatula across cast iron,

how he just took the crispiest piece for himself this time,

offering me the next best one with a quiet grin.

The vast arithmetic of love,

as immutable as the laws of planetary motion,

as small as a grain of salt dissolving into soup.

At the jetty, a biologist traced spirals in the sand,

and told us how starfish regrow their limbs,

how even if you cut them apart, they remember how to become whole.

For a moment I remembered being split,

the pieces of myself I’ve scattered—

inside plaster walls, inside salvaged oak cabinets,

inside my son’s quiet understanding

when he tells me, you’re good at making things whole again.

I press my foot into the wet sand,

watch the water rise to fill my outline,

the ocean unbothered by my presence,

erasing me as easily as I laid down.

The same tide is pulling the breath from mangroves,

nudging sea turtles toward the moon.

Somewhere, the osprey I watch from my kitchen window

is riding the wind I’ve just inhaled,

our lungs filled by the same invisible force.

a single note in the song of moving things.

Tonight, I will sleep with my windows open,

let the wind find its way across my skin.

feel its flow push me to drift,

and its ebb pull me to belong.