After the Tide

 

 

“Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”

― Sarah Kay

Beaches have a way of reminding me of everything that came to an end.

There's something quietly devastating about the tide. It arrives without urgency, without malice, and retreats having erased every trace that anyone was ever there. Footprints disappear beneath the foam as though they were never pressed into the earth at all. The ocean doesn't hesitate, doesn't mourn, doesn't even seem to notice. It simply continues.

Its indifference is what unsettles me most.

The waves wash the sand clean with a kind of definitive calm, carrying out their endless work with the quiet efficiency of someone clocking in for another ordinary day. Endings, to the sea, are routine. They happen over and over without ceremony.

But I stand there remembering every person who once walked beside me, every conversation swallowed by the wind, every version of myself that reached this shoreline believing something would last. The beach becomes an archive of absences, where everything beautiful eventually dissolves into smooth, untouched sand.

And somehow, despite knowing this is simply what the ocean does, it still feels like grief.

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Perhaps these reflections are less about the ocean than they are about this season of my life. As I move through what is likely my last postpartum journey, I find myself mourning not only what has already ended, but what will never come again.

As Sarah Kay once said, “Because there’s nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it’s sent away.”

Maybe that is the quiet gift of motherhood: it teaches you that love is measured in seasons. Every version of your child arrives only once. Every version of you arrives only once, too. We spend years wishing time would slow down, only to realize it never does—it simply keeps returning like the tide, carrying one chapter away while laying another gently at our feet.