Loving someone is like going to the beach.

Going to the beach is committing to taking some of it back with you when you leave. I don’t mean intentionally, either. No matter how hard you try, maybe by bringing a large beach towel, or staying out of the water, or religiously brushing off your hands, by some horrible miracle sand will always follow you home from the beach. You’ll be brushing it out of your hair for days, even after a shower. You’ll go to take a sip from a water bottle and find yourself gritting down on grains of sand. You’ll be swiping it off your legs, sticky with sunscreen, and from in-between your water-logged toes. You’ll reach into your bag and come back with sand stuck under your fingernails. Inevitably, when you go to the beach, you’ll come back with pieces of it.

Loving someone is a lot like going to the beach.

No matter how hard you try, grains of their being will inevitably make their way into your skin. You’ll bite down on pieces of them, and either spit them back out or swallow them whole. You’ll try to brush them out of your hair but come to realize there are some tangles that will never come out, without being cut. You’ll try to protect yourself from their powerful UV rays with sunscreens, or maybe you’ll opt for a tanning oil, to intensify their heat. You’ll find their hair on your clothes, on your bed pillow, stuck in the couch cushions. You’ll spend an hour in the shower rinsing their smell off your skin.

Yes, loving someone is like going to the beach. Once you go, you can’t come back without taking little pieces of it with you.

What we often forget, however, is that the beach gets a little of us, too, each time we go. We make impressions on the sand, manipulating its grains to create sandcastles, in burying our friends up to their heads, or by making imprints of our bodies through laid-out towels. And of course, we cannot forget our most telling clue that yes! we were here: our wandering footprints.

So, every time you go to the beach, take a look at where you’ve left some of yourself behind; take care to make these impressions kind.

breakfast on a friday mourning

sadness is when tears well up in my father’s eyes

as we sit across from one another in the worn red

leather booths of a worn down cafe chewing cinnamon

raisin toast that suddenly gets stuck in my throat

and scratches all the way down like nails on

a chalkboard the clinking of forks and knives against aging

porcelain plates fading distant in the background and i can see reflected

in the glassy blue of his eyes my own face twisted in an

anguish that is knowing i will one day cry his tears to

my own child and hope they don’t feel as though

they would morph into the tablecloth only to

catch his falling tears and so i reach between our tall

orange juices to grasp my father’s trembling hand

and the waitress comes to see if our toast is okay

yes everything is fine thank you.