The Shape of What Washes Up

The first thing I find is a bottle cap, pressed deep into wet sand like it’s trying to become something else. I pick it up anyway, wipe it clean, hold it to the light. One side’s rusted through. The other catches the sky. I can’t explain why I pocket it.

This is the ritual.

I don’t walk the beach expecting treasure anymore. The good things—the whole, perfect things—are long gone. What remains are fragments, softened by tide and time. They arrive without fanfare. They wait to be seen.

A strip of rope, sea-green and coiled like a sleeping snake.

A crab claw.

A cigarette lighter with no flint.

A glove, always just one.

A broken comb.

A child’s toy with no face left.

Something that might once have been part of a boat or a dream.

Flotsam and jetsam, the tide’s memory scattered at my feet.

I used to think the sea gave and the land received.

Now I understand it better.

The beach is the threshold. The place where stories lose their endings and begin again.

Every morning is a different story. Some mornings, the sea has pulled everything away, leaving only stillness and gull tracks. Other days, it’s heaved out the past—bits of shipwreck, bone, rope, rust, old scaffolding twisted into sculpture.

I don’t take much. Sometimes I take nothing. But I always notice.

That, I’ve learned, is enough.

There’s a seagull that watches me. Always the same one, or maybe I just tell myself that. It stands on one leg, eye half-closed, a sentinel of slack tide. We share a silent understanding. Not everything needs a purpose. Some things just are.

Some mornings I walk alone.

Other mornings, I walk with the ghosts.

The lady with the blue coat and carrier bags.

The man who sings sea shanties to himself in a language only he knows.

My younger self, running ahead, hoping to find gold doubloons or secret codes in plastic bottles.

They walk with me.

They fade.

The sea forgets nothing.

But it doesn’t hold on tight, either.

Zen tells us not to cling.

The tide teaches the same lesson.

What comes in, will go out.

What goes out, may come back changed.

The world is not built from permanence. It’s built from finding small, broken things and seeing their shape anew. Every beachcomber knows this. Every plastic picker, every kid with a bucket, every person who’s ever stared at a stone long enough to think it was something else.

This isn’t a story of saving the planet or conquering the tide.

It’s a story of looking down and still finding wonder.

A story of being the witness.

And in the end, that’s what I am.

A pair of feet on wet sand.

A breath in the wind.

A shape that washes up each morning and walks the edge of things, gathering pieces—not to fix the world, but just to know it.

RW