I hold my hands together
like a promise I cannot keep,
and still
the sand slips through;
fine, indifferent,
unwilling to belong to me.
I press harder,
cup my palms,
shape them into something careful,
something desperate,
but the grains find their way out anyway,
threading through the smallest betrayals.
This is what my body feels like:
a structure made of almosts,
a castle built too close to the tide.
I build it anyway.
I smooth the walls,
pack the corners,
pretend that if I am diligent enough
the ocean will mistake me for stone.
But the waves
do not negotiate.
They come
slow some days,
sudden on others,
and each time they take something:
a tower,
a doorway,
a name I used to answer to
without thinking.
Sometimes I don’t even notice
what’s gone
until I reach for it
and find only absence
settling like dust.
Other times
it is a collapse,
loud, undeniable,
half of me sliding away at once,
and I stand there
with wet hands
trying to remember
who I was
before the tide.
I am told to keep building.
There are roles to fill,
walls to maintain,
work that cannot wait
for the weather of my bones.
Rest is a luxury
I keep meaning to afford myself,
but the cost is immediate ruin;
everything falling now
instead of later.
So I stand in the surf
and rebuild, rebuild, rebuild,
while the water rises
around my ankles,
my knees,
my chest.
Not resting
is its own erosion.
I can feel it;
the way I thin out,
the way I fray at the edges,
the way the mask I wear
begins to crack
and leak.
It shows in small ways:
in sleep that swallows whole days,
in sharp words I don’t recognize as mine,
in the careful way
I avoid the truth
like a bruise I can’t stop pressing.
I am so tired
of being careful.
There is a stone in my chest
where crying should be:
heavy, unmoving,
a gravity I orbit without escape.
I cannot even find its edges.
I look ahead
and see only less:
less strength,
less self,
less of whatever it is
that makes a person feel whole.
A shoreline
that keeps retreating.
And there, at the farthest edge,
is the final wave.
I think about it
the way one thinks about silence
after a lifetime of noise;
not because I want it,
but because it is the only place
where the tide
stops taking.
Where the building ends.
Where the work ends.
Where the ache of holding
finally releases.
I do not want to disappear.
I only want
to stop dissolving.
So I keep going:
grain by grain,
hour by hour,
pretending my hands
are not emptying.
Doing my best
to be something solid,
something dependable,
something that does not crumble
under its own weight.
But even now
I can feel it:
the quiet slipping,
the endless sifting,
the soft, relentless undoing.
Nothing of me holds.
And still
I stand at the shore,
hands full of sand.
