For years I've hated the beach.
The dry sand clinging to skin like it belonged there and I didn't.
I avoided it. Made excuses.
Let the discomfort write the story.
Today was different.
Not entirely at first.
The same grit. The same itch.
The same instinct to brush it away.
But then stillness arrived.
A breath held long enough to shift something.
I stopped fighting the texture
and started feeling it.
Each grain impossibly small.
Each one part of something impossibly vast.
Like us in the universe.
Temporary. Scattered. Whole.
The sand isn't an invader.
It's a mirror.
I am the sand.
The sand is me.
