Before the sky could get both feet into the morning
and the gulls began litigating the beach,
I walked out to the edge of the Pacific
in hopes of getting a breather from me.

Unfortunately, and to my shock,
my heels and my history pulled up at the exact same time
and there was no polite way to ask me to leave.

I wasn’t asking for a burning bush.
I just wanted a pause to feel a thing and hear something
before I heard what I thought about that something.

My mouth had been moving too much as of late.
I don’t even know why.
I just know that I’d been treating silence like a spill
and only I carried the paper towels ‘round here.

I went to the beach that morning because I needed to hear something unsaid
and that felt like a real possibility at 5:48am.

I couldn’t see much when I got there.
The sun was still fumbling in the dark for its front door key.
Out beyond the wet sand, Haystack Rock stood with its shoulders in the surf.
A wave would climb it up and then immediately come apart.
All that falling away. All that reaching again.
Like I said I couldn’t get away from me.

Closer in, tide pools started to form in the sand —
those mystical bowls where the sea keeps its small, breakable things:
green anemones feeling for breakfast,
mussels buttoned to the throat,
the starfish gripping stone the way your hand stays on somebody’s back
long after you’ve run out of words that matter.

Here, I thought. Something could happen right here.
Something profound, but logistically low maintenance.
A cost-free convenient stumble into awe that would
loosen something in my chest without loosening my grip on the rest.

That’s when a stranger saw the miles and miles of beach,
an ocean so big it had Japan on the other end,
and chose to come stand by my puddle with me
like we were out here sharing an armrest.

Listen: I know I wanted the universe to speak to me,
but surely the Keeper knew I meant through a whale.
Or a meaningful arrangement of foam.

The woman wore a coat that Joseph would’ve worn,
had his brothers left him alone and let him retire on the coast.
She had bright halo white hair and leaned over the dark puddle
with the concentration usually reserved for threading a needle
or convincing a necklace clasp that it is indeed a necklace clasp.

“Isn’t that something,” she said.
I had no idea what she was talking about.
It could’ve been a barnacle or my Levis,
but I wasn’t about to sabotage our friendship before 6am
and so I said, “It really is.”

The small talk came next:

good morning,
cold, isn’t it—
the little verbal socks we put on before walking into somebody’s life.

I called the ocean beautiful, which I thought was kind of me.
Felt like after billions of years spent throwing itself against the sand,
somebody from Minnesota ought to give a little feedback.

A little silence came afterwards, and I didn’t grab a towel.

That’s when she told me that today was her birthday.
She was 93, and she smiled when she said it knowing I would’t believe it.
She was right: I didn’t believe it.

“Wow” I fumbled out,
my mind instantly setting ninety-three candles ablaze across an imaginary cake —
a bonfire of cake you approach with your sleeves rolled back.

I looked at the water and started doing the math.
She was colorfully crouched over the bowl again,
which now felt like a quiet, magnificent defiance of time.

34,000 dawns have rolled across her life,
and still she got up early to see what the light will show her next.

I asked her how she looked so young for 93,
which is a strange way to honor someone who has come so far:
congratulations on concealing the distance.

Whatever. And I’m sorry. I’m a better writer than talker.

She said, “You know…”

I expected the next part to be an Amazon shopping list.
I was prepared for olive oil.
For walking. A moisturizing routine.
For a highly specific grudge against margarine.

Instead she said, “I just keep looking.”

Below us, a starfish was holding the belly of a stone.
It was a shade of purple the sun hadn’t even invented yet.
I saw it earlier, but now I noticed the little knobs on its back,
the uneven reach of its arms and how one tip turned into a crevice
where I couldn’t follow.

The lady smiled at me, and then went on to another bowl.

I don’t know her name.
I don’t know who used to say it from another room.
I don’t know what she’s lost or what she loves.
I don’t know why she didn’t sleep in on her birthday,
or if a card was waiting on her kitchen table,
or if a phone would ring at nine,
or if she would get to tell someone else it was her birthday.

I just know that she had lived through 34,000 days,
and still threw on the bright and colorful coat
so that she could come down and look.

She could have told me she’d seen it all and I would’ve believed her.

Instead, she crouched over where the water trembled,
making room for something she hadn’t seen yet.

Isn’t that something?


16×20
Oil, Acrylic, Pastel on Canvas
Framed in White Select Pine
2026