Where the tides return

Chapter 1: The Drive South

There are places that ask us to become someone.

And then there are places that simply allow us to remember who we've always been.

For me, that place has always been the ocean.

Long before I understood what healing meant, before I had words like grief, longing, or belonging, there was a small stretch of shoreline waiting quietly along the coast. It knew nothing about my future, and yet somehow, it knew me.

Some of my earliest memories begin in a driveway.

It is early morning, though the sun has already begun warming the pavement beneath my bare feet. My parents move with practiced precision, loading beach chairs into our light blue-gray Honda van, followed by coolers, grocery bags, pillows, and towels that still smell faintly of sunscreen from the summer before, and enough luggage to convince a child we were leaving forever.

My brother and I are useless.

We contribute nothing except excitement.

We tumble down the garage steps and climb into the car before the doors are even fully open. As our parents make one last check to see if we've remembered everything, one of us can't help asking, "Are we leaving now?"

The answer never changes.

"Almost."

As a child, almost feels like an eternity.

Eventually the van doors slide shut.

Seatbelts click into place.

The engine hums softly to life.

And just like that, another summer begins.

The drive takes four hours.

Back then, four hours felt unimaginably long. Today I could barely tell you what roads we traveled or which towns we passed. Childhood has a remarkable way of erasing the journey while preserving the destination.

I remember naps against the window.

Road signs counting down the miles.

The inevitable stop at Smithfield's Barbecue, because no trip to the beach ever truly began without it.

My brother and I inventing games simply to make time move faster.

But what I remember most is the feeling.

Every mile carried a promise.

We weren't simply driving toward a vacation.

We were driving toward the version of myself I loved most.

Long before we arrived, I would roll the window down just enough to let the outside air slip inside.

At first it smelled like nothing at all.

Then, almost imperceptibly, everything changed.

The air became heavier.

Softer.

Alive.

Salt.

Even now, decades later, I don't believe there is another scent capable of transporting me through time so completely.

One breath, and I am ten years old again.

The van turns onto the familiar street, lined with weathered beach houses standing patiently beneath the Carolina sky. My heart begins racing before we have even pulled into the driveway.

Before my father shifts the van into park, my brother already has the door halfway open.

The moment my feet touch the ground, I feel it.

The breeze.

It moves through me before it moves around me.

It carries the scent of salt, sea oats, warm wood, and something I have never found words for.

Perhaps peace has a fragrance.

If it does, it smells like this.

We race toward the house.

The long wooden staircase seems impossibly tall to my younger legs, but that has never stopped us. Two steps at a time, laughing as though the ocean itself might disappear if we don't reach it quickly enough.

Inside, the house greets us exactly as it always has.

The floors creak beneath our feet.

The walls hold years of summer sunlight within their grain.

The air smells of weathered pine, salt carried through open windows, and memories layered so deeply into the wood that they seem inseparable from the house itself.

The checkered floor always feels as though it belongs to another house, yet I can't imagine this one without it. The old weather radio hums quietly in the background, speaking almost entirely of storm warnings and shifting tides. It should feel ominous. Instead, it feels like home.

Without unpacking, I run straight toward the window.

There it is.

The Atlantic.

Stretching farther than I can comprehend, endless, patient, blue beyond description.

Scattered across the horizon, enormous kites drift effortlessly through the sky, their bright colors catching the wind as surfers carve across the water below.

They float so gracefully they seem suspended between sea and sky, less like people and more like brushstrokes in a painting.

Every afternoon they return, as dependable as the tide itself. I cannot imagine this beach without them. Somehow, they have become part of the landscape, as essential to the ocean as the waves, the gulls, and the salt carried on the breeze.

No matter how many times I saw it, the sight always stole something from me.

Not my breath.

My thoughts.

The ocean had a curious way of silencing the endless conversation constantly unfolding inside my mind.

Before long, I am already changing into my bathing suit.

Everything else can wait.

The bags.

The groceries.

Lunch.

None of it matters.

Only the water.

I slide open the heavy glass doors, leaning my whole body into them the way I always have.

They resist at first before gliding open with a familiar groan.

I step onto the porch, as wide as the one back home. Nothing has changed. The same white plastic chairs, topped with faded green cushions, sit exactly where they've always been. The matching couch, just as dated and just as wonderfully out of place, still overlooks the dunes. In another home, the set would feel forgotten. Here, it feels as though it has always belonged.'

A few more steps carry me to the edge of the porch.

Beyond it stretches the boardwalk, impossibly long through my childhood eyes, disappearing between the sea oats and rolling dunes before finally surrendering to the ocean beyond.

The afternoon sun warms the weathered planks beneath my feet. Sea grass bends gently with the wind, bowing toward the dunes as though welcoming old friends home.

Then my feet sink into the sand.

Warm.

Soft.

Familiar.

It gives way beneath every step, asking me to slow down without ever saying a word.

Finally, the first wave reaches me.

Cold water rushes over my ankles before retreating quietly back toward the horizon.

I stand perfectly still.

There is something about this moment that has repeated itself every summer of my life, yet it has never become ordinary.

The world behind me disappears.

School.

Schedules.

Expectations.

Even time itself feels less important here.

The horizon stretches farther than my imagination can follow.

The waves breathe in and out with effortless certainty.

The wind carries no urgency.

Nothing here seems concerned with becoming anything other than what it already is.

As a child, I couldn't explain why the ocean made me feel the way it did.

I only knew that every time I stood beside it, something inside me became wonderfully quiet.

Years later, I would discover that the ocean had been teaching me long before I ever realized I was a student.

I simply wasn't old enough to understand the lesson.

There is something extraordinary about the way children love.

Not the way they love people, though they do that with remarkable sincerity, but the way they love places.

Chapter 2: The Sea That Knew Me First

A child does not ask whether a place is beautiful enough to deserve affection.

He simply returns to it until it becomes part of who he is.

The ocean became part of me long before I understood that a place could shape a person.

Looking back now, I realize that my happiest memories were never built around grand adventures or carefully planned moments. They lived quietly in the ordinary rituals that repeated themselves every summer.

Early mornings before the rest of the house had awakened.

Bare feet brushing away yesterday's footprints.

Searching for shells that somehow felt different from the hundreds I had already collected.

Watching tiny ghost crabs disappear into the sand as if the earth itself had swallowed them whole.

Running back to the shoreline, skimboard in hand, convinced that this would be the time I stayed on my feet. I fell into the shallow surf more times than I could count, laughing, brushing the sand from my legs, and trying again without ever wondering if I would eventually get it.

When I grew tired, I stood quietly at the edge of the water, watching each wave rush in before slipping back into the sea. Within seconds, my footprints disappeared, as though I had never been there at all.

It fascinated me.

The ocean remembered everything.

Yet it held onto nothing.

As a child, I spent hours building sandcastles with the quiet confidence that they would last forever.

I sculpted towers and walls with the precision only a child believes matters. I dug moats that filled with seawater and imagined kingdoms stretching far beyond the dunes.

Then, without warning, a single wave would arrive.

It never apologized.

It never hesitated.

It simply reclaimed the shore.

For a moment I would feel disappointed, even heartbroken.

Then I would begin again.

Children possess a remarkable gift.

They rebuild without questioning whether it is worth rebuilding.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, many of us lose that instinct.

We begin believing that every ending must be permanent.

That every loss is evidence against us.

That every wave is somehow personal.

I think that is why I have always admired the sea.

Nothing about it resists its own nature.

The tide does not argue with the moon.

The waves do not apologize for breaking.

The wind does not ask permission before changing direction.

Everything belongs exactly where it is, even while it is changing.

As a boy, I couldn't have explained any of this.

I only knew that whenever I walked along the shoreline, I felt as though I belonged too.

There were afternoons when I wandered for miles without realizing how far I had gone.

I wasn't searching for anything.

At least, I didn't think I was.

Sometimes I collected shells, turning each one over in my hands as though it carried a story only patience could reveal.

Some were chipped.

Some perfectly whole.

Some polished smooth by years beneath the waves.

Others rough around the edges.

Yet I never thought to leave one behind because it wasn't perfect.

I wonder now why we find it so much easier to extend that grace to seashells than we do to ourselves.

Perhaps the ocean understood beauty differently than we do.

Perhaps beauty had never been perfection at all.

Perhaps it had always been shaped by endurance.

The afternoons seemed endless.

The sun drifted lazily across the sky while the waves continued their patient conversation with the shore.

Sometimes I floated on my back for what felt like hours, surrendering completely to the water beneath me.

I wasn't trying to go anywhere.

I simply trusted that the ocean knew how to hold me.

It never occurred to me that this was trust.

Children rarely recognize the miracles they practice every day.

Trusting.

Wondering.

Believing.

They simply live them.

It is only later that we give those things names.

There were evenings when my family gathered to watch the sun disappear into the horizon.

Everyone grew quieter then.

Even as children, my brother and I somehow understood that sunsets deserved silence.

The sky became a masterpiece no artist could ever recreate.

Blues surrendered to gold.

Gold softened into amber.

Amber faded into shades of pink and violet that seemed almost impossible.

Then, almost unnoticed, darkness arrived.

Not suddenly.

Not violently.

Just gently enough that you hardly realized day had left until the first stars began appearing overhead.

The ocean never mourned the setting sun.

It welcomed the night with the same grace it had welcomed the morning.

Looking back, I think that was the first lesson the sea ever offered me.

Everything beautiful eventually changes.

Not because it has failed to remain beautiful.

Because change is part of beauty itself.

Still, I was too young to understand.

To me, the beach was simply where I laughed the loudest.

Where my imagination stretched as endlessly as the horizon.

Where creativity seemed to flow without effort.

Where joy arrived uninvited and never asked how long it was allowed to stay.

It would take many years before I realized that what I loved most about the ocean had very little to do with the ocean itself.

It was the version of myself I became whenever I stood beside it.

The boy who wasn't afraid.

The boy who never questioned whether tomorrow would be good.

The boy who assumed the world was fundamentally kind.

The boy who believed life was always moving in his favor, even when he had no evidence that it was.

That boy never worried about whether the tide would return.

He simply knew it would.

I often wonder when we stop believing things like that.

No one tells us to become afraid.

No one teaches us to doubt our own lives.

Fear arrives quietly.

It disguises itself as maturity.

It convinces us that preparing for the worst is wisdom.

That controlling every outcome is responsibility.

That certainty is the only path to peace.

I did not know it then, but there would come a time when I would trade that innocent trust for something much heavier.

There would come a season when I would stand before this same ocean carrying questions it could not answer.

Questions about love.

About loss.

About whether a broken heart could ever find its rhythm again.

And when that season arrived, the sea would greet me exactly as it always had.

Patiently.

Without judgment.

Waiting for me to remember what the little boy already knew.

Chapter 3: The Year the Tide Changed

There are years that quietly pass through our lives, leaving behind little more than photographs and fading memories.

And then there are years that divide a life into two chapters.

The life before.

And the life after.

Then came the season that changed everything.

It arrived no differently than any other, carrying birthdays, ordinary mornings, late-night conversations, and the quiet assumption that tomorrow would resemble today.

I had no reason to believe otherwise.

Love has a remarkable way of making the future feel tangible. It invites us to imagine birthdays we have not yet celebrated, homes we have not yet lived in, conversations that have not yet happened. Slowly, without realizing it, we begin building a life inside our imagination long before we ever arrive there.

I wasn't just in love with a person.

I had fallen in love with a future.

It was a future so vivid that it began to feel like a memory waiting to happen.

Then, almost without warning, it disappeared.

No one prepares you for your first heartbreak.

People tell you that it hurts.

They tell you that time heals.

They tell you that everything happens for a reason.

But no one tells you that grief is so much quieter than you expect.

It doesn't always arrive in dramatic waves.

Sometimes it appears in ordinary moments.

A song you weren't expecting.

An empty seat.

A restaurant you no longer visit.

A photograph you hesitate to delete.

It settles into the smallest corners of your life until even joy begins to feel unfamiliar.

The hardest part was never saying goodbye.

The hardest part was watching the future I had imagined dissolve before I ever had the chance to live it.

It felt as though someone had erased an entire chapter of my life before I had written the first sentence.

I didn't know where to place all the love that suddenly had nowhere to go.

So, I turned it inward.

Not as compassion.

As interrogation.

I began asking questions that had no answers.

What if I had said something differently?

What if I had loved better?

What if I had waited?

What if I had stayed?

What if I simply wasn't enough?

The questions multiplied faster than I could silence them.

Every memory became evidence.

Every silence became a verdict.

Every unanswered message became another story my mind was eager to finish.

It was exhausting.

Looking back now, I realize something I couldn't see then.

I wasn't trying to understand what had happened.

I was trying to undo it.

If I could replay enough conversations...

Analyze enough moments...

Imagine enough alternate endings...

Perhaps I could somehow rewrite reality.

As though the mind, given enough determination, could persuade time to reverse its course.

But time has never spoken the language of regret.

It simply keeps moving.

Mine did not.

The days became strangely repetitive.

I would wake with the same thoughts that had followed me to sleep.

Some mornings, before my feet even touched the floor, my mind had already begun rehearsing conversations that would never happen.

I became fluent in a language no one else could hear.

The language of what if.

There is no peace in that language.

Only endless revisions of a story that has already been written.

The strange thing about heartbreak is that it rarely convinces you that you lost someone.

It convinces you that you have lost yourself.

Somewhere beneath the sadness, another fear quietly began taking root.

A fear far greater than the relationship itself.

What if no one ever loved me like that again?

What if this was my chance?

What if being alone meant I had somehow become unlovable?

It is astonishing how quickly loneliness begins impersonating truth.

It whispers with remarkable confidence.

It tells you that one ending predicts every ending.

That one goodbye somehow becomes evidence against your entire future.

That because you cannot currently see love, love no longer exists.

Fear has always been an extraordinary storyteller.

It writes endings before beginnings have the opportunity to introduce themselves.

And for a while...

I believed every word.

The irony was almost impossible to recognize then.

As a little boy, I had stood beside the ocean completely at peace with uncertainty.

I never wondered where the tide went.

I never questioned whether it would return.

I trusted something I couldn't explain.

Yet somehow, as I grew older, I stopped extending that same trust to my own life.

I needed answers.

I needed guarantees.

I needed certainty before I allowed myself to believe everything would be okay.

Without realizing it, I had begun trying to control life itself.

Not because I was controlling by nature.

Because I was afraid.

Afraid that if I loosened my grip, everything I loved would slip away.

Afraid that if I stopped worrying, I would somehow be unprepared for more pain.

Afraid that hope itself was dangerous.

So, I held tighter.

Tighter to memories.

Tighter to expectations.

Tighter to the future I had already imagined.

And like trying to hold water in closed fists...

The tighter I held...

The more everything seemed to disappear.

That summer, almost instinctively, I found myself returning to the one place that had always felt like home.

The ocean was waiting.

Exactly where I had left it.

The same waves.

The same horizon.

The same salt drifting effortlessly through the wind.

Nothing about the sea had changed.

Only the person standing before it.

I walked slowly toward the shoreline, allowing the water to gather around my feet.

For a long time, I simply watched.

The waves arrived.

The waves departed.

Again.

And again.

The rhythm had not changed in all the years I had been away.

The ocean had continued trusting itself.

I wondered if somewhere beneath all my fear...

I still could too.

Chapter 4: Chasing The Tide

There is a quiet loneliness that follows heartbreak.

Not the kind that comes from an empty room or an unanswered message.

A deeper kind.

The kind that makes you feel as though life has continued moving while you have somehow remained behind.

It is a peculiar feeling, to be surrounded by people who love you and still feel alone.

To laugh with friends while carrying a heaviness no one else can see.

To wake each morning hoping today will feel different, only to discover your heart has kept yesterday waiting beside your bed.

I returned to the beach believing the ocean would somehow make sense of it all.

Not because I expected answers.

But because I had forgotten how to ask the right questions.

Every morning became a ritual.

Before the world had fully awakened, I would walk toward the shoreline with a cup of coffee warming my hands.

The beach was almost empty then.

Only a few fishermen standing silently at the water's edge.

A couple collecting shells.

Pelicans gliding so effortlessly above the waves that they seemed to belong more to the wind than the earth.

The ocean was always the first thing awake.

Its rhythm never changed.

It did not know that my heart was broken.

Or perhaps it did.

Perhaps it simply understood that broken things have always belonged here.

I would sit watching the tide move in and out, while my mind wandered somewhere entirely different.

It wandered backward.

Back into conversations.

Back into memories.

Back into moments I believed I could somehow rearrange if I examined them long enough.

I became an architect of imaginary futures.

If only I had said this.

If only I had waited one more day.

If only I had loved differently.

If only...

Those two words became a prison.

Every if only promised relief but delivered another question.

Another version of reality I could never inhabit.

I thought I was searching for understanding.

In truth, I was searching for control.

Control over something that had already become part of yesterday.

Fear is strange that way.

It convinces us that if we worry enough, we can somehow protect ourselves from pain.

As though anxiety is a form of preparation.

As though rehearsing tragedy makes it easier to survive.

It doesn't.

It simply asks us to suffer twice.

Once in imagination.

And once, if it ever comes at all.

One afternoon, I watched the tide slowly pull away from the shore.

The water retreated so gradually that you could almost miss it if you weren't paying attention.

Minute by minute, more sand appeared.

The shoreline grew wider.

The ocean seemed farther away.

For reasons I couldn't explain, it unsettled me.

Watching the sea withdraw felt like watching love leave all over again.

It looked so final.

So certain.

So absolute.

I caught myself wishing it would stop.

Stay here.

Don't go.

Remain exactly as you are.

The thought arrived so naturally that I almost laughed.

Wasn't that what I had been asking of my life?

Stay.

Don't change.

Don't leave.

Don't surprise me.

Become exactly what I have imagined.

For months, I had believed my suffering came from losing someone I loved.

Standing there, I realized something far more unsettling.

Much of my suffering had come from refusing to release the future I had written in my mind.

I wasn't grieving only what had happened.

I was grieving everything I had expected to happen.

There is a profound difference.

The first is heartbreak.

The second is resistance.

And resistance is exhausting.

I had spent so much energy trying to force life back into the shape I preferred that I had stopped noticing the life still unfolding around me.

The breeze still carried the scent of salt.

The sun still painted silver across the water.

Children still chased waves with the same reckless joy I once had.

The world had never stopped offering beauty.

I had simply become too consumed with loss to receive it.

Then something caught my attention.

Far beyond the exposed shoreline, almost imperceptibly, the ocean had already begun its return.

No announcement.

No urgency.

No struggle.

It simply turned and came home.

Wave after wave.

Exactly as it always had.

The tide had never been leaving me.

It had only been keeping a promise I was too afraid to trust.

I stood there for a long time, watching the water reclaim the sand it had surrendered only hours before.

Not once did the shoreline chase it.

Not once did the ocean apologize for leaving.

Neither resisted the rhythm they had always known.

I thought about the little boy who had stood here years before.

The one who laughed every time the waves knocked him off balance.

The one who built sandcastles knowing the sea would eventually carry them away.

He had understood something I had forgotten.

He had never loved the ocean because it stayed the same.

He loved it because it was alive.

Because it moved.

Because every wave was different, and somehow that made the sea even more beautiful.

Somewhere between childhood and adulthood, I had begun believing that love meant permanence.

That peace required certainty.

That happiness depended upon life unfolding according to my plans.

The ocean believed none of those things.

It had been practicing surrender for millions of years.

Every wave released itself completely.

Every tide trusted it would return.

Nothing in nature clung to what it had already become.

Only I did.

As the sun began sinking toward the horizon, the light stretched across the water in ribbons of gold.

The sea shimmered like liquid glass.

For the first time in months, I noticed that my mind had grown quiet.

Not because every question had been answered.

But because I had stopped demanding that they be.

Standing there, ankle-deep in the water, I understood something the ocean had been trying to teach me since I was a little boy.

Peace is not found when life finally becomes predictable.

Peace arrives the moment we stop believing it ever needed to be.

The tide reached my feet once more.

I smiled.

And for the first time since my heart had broken...

I let it go.

Chapter 5: What The Ocean Knew

Healing did not arrive all at once.

It never does.

No sunrise has ever rushed the morning.

No tide has ever hurried toward the shore.

The ocean had known this all along.

I was the one still learning.

For a long time, I believed healing would feel like forgetting.

I imagined waking one morning to discover that every memory had somehow become lighter, that every unanswered question had finally found its answer, that my heart would no longer tighten at the mention of a name.

Instead, healing arrived much more quietly.

It appeared in ordinary moments.

The first time I laughed without forcing it.

The first morning I woke up before my thoughts did.

The first evening I watched the sunset without wishing I could share it with someone else.

None of these moments announced themselves.

They simply arrived, like waves upon the shore.

One after another.

Until one day I realized they had become my life.

Looking back, I see now that I had spent so much of my energy trying to convince life to unfold according to my plans that I had forgotten to notice how generously it was unfolding on its own.

I wanted certainty.

Life kept offering possibility.

I wanted guarantees.

Life kept offering invitations.

I wanted to know exactly who I would love, where I would end up, and how every chapter would unfold.

The ocean offered no such promises.

Only a horizon.

And perhaps that was enough.

It is a strange thing, standing before a horizon.

You can see forever.

Yet you cannot see what is coming.

Ships appear from places that moments before seemed empty.

Storms gather beyond the edge of sight.

Sunrises begin long before your eyes can witness them.

The horizon has always been an invitation to trust what exists beyond your vision.

Perhaps life is no different.

I began to notice how much of nature depends upon surrender.

The tide yields to the moon.

The moon yields to the heavens.

The seasons release one another without protest.

Trees let go of leaves they spent months growing.

Seeds disappear beneath the earth before they ever become flowers.

Nothing beautiful in nature clings to what it used to be.

Only we do.

Perhaps that is why we suffer.

Not because life changes.

But because we ask it not to.

The more I returned to the ocean, the more I realized that what I had mistaken for chaos was often simply movement.

The waves were never disorganized.

They were dancing with forces I could not see.

My own life, I began to suspect, might be doing the same.

Not everything needed my understanding before it deserved my trust.

There was an unexpected freedom in that realization.

For the first time in years, I stopped trying to predict every ending before allowing myself to enjoy the beginning.

I stopped believing that every unanswered text carried hidden meaning.

I stopped mistaking uncertainty for rejection.

Most importantly, I stopped believing that love was something I had to chase before it disappeared.

I had spent so much of my life gripping the future with closed hands that I had forgotten what open hands were capable of receiving.

The funny thing about open hands is that they cannot cling.

But they can welcome.

They can create.

They can build.

They can embrace.

And perhaps most importantly...

They can trust.

People often speak about "letting go" as though it is an act of loss.

I have come to believe the opposite.

Letting go is not losing your grip.

It is loosening your fear.

It is making peace with the possibility that life may have imagined something more beautiful than you have been able to imagine for yourself.

I think that frightened us because we confuse uncertainty with emptiness.

They are not the same.

Uncertainty is simply a field where possibility has not yet introduced itself.

Standing beside the ocean one evening, I found myself smiling at a thought that would have felt impossible only months before.

What if life has never been working against me?

What if every closed door had quietly redirected me toward one I had not yet discovered?

What if every goodbye had made room for an unexpected hello?

What if the things I mourned were not punishments...

But preparations?

The questions felt different now.

They no longer came from fear.

They came from wonder.

And wonder has always asked gentler questions than fear ever could.

The sky slowly surrendered its blue to gold.

The water reflected every color without trying to hold onto a single one.

The breeze carried the same familiar scent that had welcomed me since childhood.

Nothing had changed.

Yet everything had.

I realized that the ocean had never been trying to teach me how to avoid heartbreak.

Love, like the sea, asks us to be vulnerable.

It asks us to risk.

It asks us to enter the water without knowing exactly where the waves will carry us.

No.

The ocean had been teaching me something infinitely kinder.

That I could trust myself to survive whatever tide arrived next.

That no season of loneliness could erase my worth.

That no ending possessed the authority to define the rest of my story.

The sea had never promised me calm waters.

It taught me that peace was never found in controlling the tide.

Peace was found in trusting that, no matter what the ocean carried away, it would always bring something new with the next wave.

That is what the little boy beside the ocean had known all along.

And somewhere along the way, I remembered it too.