I once believed the past was a shore.
A place I had left yet could somehow return to if I sailed far enough, remembered it well enough, or grieved long enough.
One evening, as the melody of The Past drifted through the room, I realized that time is more like a wave that never reaches a shore to rest on.
The past is not a shore. It is the sea itself.
Its waves carry fragments of unfinished lives: letters never sent, words swallowed by pride, embraces too brief, and summers that slipped away unnoticed. They rise without warning, crashing against the rocks of memory and scattering silver reflections across the water.
The first Christmas after I lost my husband, I stood tearfully at the edge of those waves, trying to gather what they left behind. I wanted to rescue lost moments from the tide, smooth away regrets, and reclaim what time had taken. But the sea keeps nothing still. Each wave erases the trace of the one before it.
Perhaps that is its mercy.
For the tides know what we often refuse to accept: the past was never a destination waiting to be reached again. The shore we long for exists nowhere except within us, only in memory. It is a horizon we pursue but never touch.
When the music ended, the sea fell silent.
And in that stillness, I understood that the past does not ask to be recovered. It asks only to be remembered. Its waves will continue their eternal murmur, rising and receding in the soul’s hidden depths, while the shore that once seemed so real slowly dissolves into mist.