The Salt-Stained Echo of a Ghostly Summer

The tide does not remember my name, yet it washes over my skin with a familiarity that aches.
I walk along this obsidian shoreline where the city lights flicker like dying stars against the horizon—a constellation of distant lives I once belonged to. My swimsuit is a deep, bruised teal, mirroring the ocean's secrets, clinging to me like a memory that refuses to be erased.

Every step into the wet sand feels like an excavation of my own history. I can almost hear him in the rhythm of the waves—the man who taught me that silence isn't empty, but full of unsaid promises. He lived in the spaces between breaths, a phantom warmth in a cold apartment. Now, his presence is just salt on my lips and the lingering scent of sea spray.

But tonight, as the sun bleeds into a pale lavender bruise, I feel a shift. The wind catches my hair, pulling it toward the past while my body moves forward into the now. In this liminal space between land and water, I am healing. Not by forgetting him, but by learning to carry his ghost like a hidden jewel beneath my skin. The city calls for me with its neon hum, but here, under the weeping sky, I find the only sanctuary that matters: the quiet courage to be alone without feeling lost.

Editor: Antique Box