I. The Tide

When I was a boy, the ocean had a rhythm—one we lived by.

Each year, like clockwork, the tide would rise higher than usual. We called it alta da maré—high tide season. It came once a year, always at night, like a secret the sea whispered to those who knew how to listen. The water would swell with an ancient purpose, folding itself into the edges of our world, then pull back by morning as if nothing had happened. But we remembered.

My family ran a beachside restaurant built on stilts, with our home just behind it —each hut a fragile miracle propped above sand that never stopped shifting. It wasn’t a place with walls and air conditioning—it was skeletal, open-air, alive. Music played from tinny radios, mingling with the clatter of silverware and the sizzle of garlic hitting oil. We served fresh-caught fish under thatched roofs, the sea always within reach. On slow nights, you could hear the waves exhale against the shore, so close it felt like the ocean was breathing with us

During high tide season, everything changed. We became builders as much as cooks—digging out old support beams, tying new ones in place with rope and calloused hands. My father called it preparing for the ritual. My mother just called it necessary. We’d sandbag the walkways, raise the propane tanks, pray the water would remember its place.

And still—every year—there was awe.

We’d sit beneath the smaller huts, the ones scattered like dice along the shoreline, and watch the sea crawl closer. The plastic chairs sank a little deeper into the sand each night. The waves swelled, deliberate and slow, like something ancient remembering its name.

It was thrilling, like waiting for a storm. Beautiful. Predictable.

Until the year it didn’t stop.

That year, the water didn’t pull back. It pushed forward, steadily, relentlessly, as if reclaiming something we had borrowed. The beach narrowed until it disappeared. The sand gave way to sidewalk, then to soil beneath the pavement. One morning I looked out from our porch and saw the earth beneath our house split open—rebar jutting like bones from a wounded jaw.

And then, one night, I woke to a sound I’d only ever known from a distance—the sea, close. Too close.

The waves were slamming against the walls—urgent, intimate, wrong. I sat up, breath held, staring through the thick glass blocks of my bedroom window. The Atlantic shimmered inches away—shifting, furious, alive.

By the time I opened my bedroom door, the house was already awake. My parents were in motion—bags half-zipped, drawers open, my siblings pulled from dreams by the kind of urgency only disaster provides.

We left that night.

And when we came back, part of the house was gone.

⸻

II. The Vanishing

Now, when I remember that place—our home at the edge of the world—it doesn’t feel like my life anymore. It feels like I’m borrowing someone else’s memories. Like watching the final scene of a movie I used to know by heart, only to realize I’ve forgotten how it ends.

We moved—from the beach to a hill. From Brazil to Wildomar, California. From a coastline of color and coral to a dry inland valley where silence stretches for miles and the only neighbor is the Cornerstone Church.

Years later, I went looking for what remained.

I found a travel blog.

A European tourist had wandered through Icaraí’s fractured shoreline. He described the ruins where the barracas once stood, and used my parents’ restaurant as a landmark. “Once called Barraca Feitiço do Mar,” he wrote, translating it as “Curse of the Ocean.”

He didn’t know feitiço meant spell.

It wasn’t a warning. It was an enchantment.

In the photo he shared, he stood grinning atop a pile of painted rubble—mural bricks, the ones from the wall of the restaurant. My bedroom wall. The coral. The whale. The reef. All of it.

Now those fragments are souvenirs.

Tourists collect them like sea glass—trendy little bits of color scattered by the tide, waiting to be taken home and propped up as a memory of someone’s trip to Brazil’s northeastern coast.

I didn’t feel anger. Not quite grief. Just… distance. Like watching someone else laugh in a room I used to live in.

Sometimes, when I remember that house—the painted walls, the glass bricks, the sea pressing itself against the frame—the memories are familiar, but blurred at the edges. Brazil lingers like a dream I woke from too soon.

One I’ve spent years hoping to reenter.

But dreams have their own tides.

And they never come back the same way twice.

⸻

III. The Stillness

In 2020, the water came again—but this time, there was no ocean. Just a silence that moved through the world like fog, slow and suffocating.

At first, it was just the pandemic. Projects canceled. Shoots postponed. Life grinding to a surreal, breath-held pause. I tried to adapt—told myself it was temporary, that ambition could hibernate and wake again.

Then I was hit by a car.

My left wrist was crushed—shattered so badly it needed reconstructive surgery. My right elbow was broken. Other parts of me bruised and bent. I wasn’t dying, but I couldn’t function. I couldn’t use my hands. Couldn’t feed myself. Couldn’t open a door. Couldn’t even make my bed.

I remember watching a YouTube video—some guy with no arms demonstrating how to tuck a fitted sheet using just his feet and torso. I followed along, lying flat, flailing like a newborn bird, trying to make my bed with forearms and knees. I learned how to shampoo my hair by squeezing the bottle onto my thigh and dragging my leg up to my head like some kind of contortionist. Every basic task became a puzzle. Some were funny. Most weren’t.

I was alone in the house after surgery. No help. No hands.

Just pain, silence, and the stubborn need to keep going.

There were days I barely moved. I’d lie flat, arms suspended in slings, the anesthesia pump strapped to my shoulder like a strange little lifeline. It hissed softly, rhythmically, sending a stream of numbness through the shattered bones of my left arm. I tried to focus on that—on the cool, quiet absence of pain. But instead, I became aware of something deeper. Not pain. Not fear. Just this slow, creeping hollowness. A feeling like the world had gone on without me.

Eventually, I healed—enough to walk around again. Enough to move, barely. I’d shuffle through the house in my underwear, one arm in a sling, the other clutching a cider. Or a joint. Or both. I looked like a mythic burnout version of myself—someone who once had momentum and had accidentally hit pause forever.

I had fought so hard for that life in Santa Cruz. Every opportunity I’d clawed my way into, every set I’d run, every shoot I’d called the shots on—it all felt like it had led to something real. Something rising.

And then, like before, the tide came and took it all away.

My room—once pridefully symbolic of my passions and accomplishments—now felt like a museum of what I used to be. Every item reminded me of a version of myself I could no longer access. And I began to come to grips with the quiet possibility that if I failed to once again make a life doing what I loved, I might spend the rest of mine like this—haunting the life I used to live.

For the first time, I started asking what it all meant.

And I couldn’t find an answer that didn’t feel like wishful thinking.

If there’s something out there—some divine logic stitching the universe together—I doubt it thinks in ways that make sense to us. The explanations we offer ourselves feel too human. Too tidy. Too emotionally convenient for something as wild and endless as existence.

I thought about this again recently while looking at an old photograph on instagram—black and white, faded, probably from the late 1800s. A man sits on the back of a truck or train, face half-turned to the sun. He looks so alive. Not iconic or historical. Just… there. Breathing. Squinting. Probably thinking about something ordinary. In that moment, he was real.

It hit me:

That man looked up at the same sky I do. Drank the same water. Felt the same ache in his back. Had to piss when he woke up. Missed someone. Loved someone. Got frustrated at nothing. He was alive—and now he’s gone.

Most of humanity is like that. Full lives, big loves, quiet heartbreaks—all gone. Billions of people have lived and died under this sky, and most of their stories will never be told. That used to make me feel unbearably small. Like I was dissolving into something infinite and impersonal.

To cope, I fell down rabbit holes.

I started watching upscaled, colorized footage of life in the early 1900s—grainy clips of men in top hats, kids playing in streets of brick and dust. In one video, the camera sits at the end of a long road. People walk by—some glancing at the camera, some deliberately ignoring it, others unaware of its presence entirely. And then, two boys—maybe eight or nine—walk up, look directly into the lens, and laugh. One of them raises his hand like he’s going to touch it.

In that moment, they were alive.

They had entire lives ahead of them.

And while I’ll never know how long they lived, I like to imagine it was long. That they loved and fought and changed and laughed until they didn’t anymore.

And I started to think about how often I was told, growing up, that I had my whole life ahead of me.

I was the youngest—my siblings five and six years older. I was always the one with time. Always being told to slow down. To enjoy my youth. To be patient.

It took the urgency out of things. Made life feel indefinite—like time would always be waiting for me on the other side of whatever detour I took.

I started college at fifteen. Graduated early. I was surrounded by people older than me, deeper into life than me. I always felt young.

And now… I look around and I’m the oldest in my circle.

And every year I hear the ocean again, though it’s nowhere near me.

And every year I wonder how long I’ve been gone from the place I came from.

⸻

IV. The Return

But now—there is Kiera.

She didn’t arrive with fanfare. No tides parting. No magic spell.

Just a voice on the phone one night that made everything feel a little less heavy.

We met during another kind of shift—one that crept in slowly. After everything started to feel uncertain again. After I found myself back in that familiar place of asking what any of this means.

And maybe that’s why it mattered.

Not because she solved it.

Not because she made the questions go away.

But because she showed up anyway. Full of color and curiosity and warmth.

She’s silly in all the best ways. Bright in ways I forgot life could be. The kind of person who laughs with her whole face. Who makes a random Tuesday feel like a holiday.

She’s here. With me. In the same year. In the same hour. On the same side of the glass.

And that’s something.

That’s everything.

We’re building a life—imperfect and playful and full of little moments.

Not grand. Not tidy. Just real.

Just mornings. Just glances.

Just the feeling of her hand in mine while the rest of the world spins.

I don’t believe in permanence anymore.

Not in places, not in plans, not in time.

Maybe permanence was never a place or a promise.

Maybe it’s just someone who stays when everything else shifts.

And if I’m trapped in time—if we all are—

then I’m grateful this is the moment I get to be trapped in.

With her.

It happened on an otherwise uneventful afternoon.

One of those windless, lukewarm days that feel stretched thin by repetition.

The student was alone, as usual—not by misfortune, but by quiet choice.

They preferred the background of things and the space to think deeply. People often felt like too much, too loud, too messy—like stepping into a current you weren’t ready to swim in.

People passed by like faint memories, and the student observed without needing to be observed. That was enough, most of the time.

They walked the same path every day.

Sat at the same bench.

Always at the edge of the garden, where the hedges grew a little wild and the bricks beneath the bench were uneven from decades of shifting earth.

The garden was technically part of the campus grounds, tucked behind the science building where few students bothered to linger.

A low iron gate. Cracked flagstone paths. Benches that seemed placed without intention.

Overgrown. Overlooked.

The student liked it for that.

That day, someone else was already sitting at their usual bench.

It took a moment to register.

The figure sat quietly on the far end, almost blending into the background—coat buttoned, gloves on, posture composed.

Something about them felt out of sync with the season—coat too heavy, gloves too precise.

As if dressed for a colder world.

Not alarming, exactly.

Just… off.

The student slowed.

Not afraid.

Just instinctively bracing for an awkward hello. Or worse—a conversation.

For a split second, they considered turning around—an escape, clean and easy.

But their feet kept moving.

Better to follow the routine than risk seeming rude.

The figure said nothing, even as the student settled beside them.

As the student sat, they caught a strange scent—faint, like wet stone or distant rain on warm pavement. Petrichor, unmistakably. But the sky was dry, and the garden hadn’t seen water in days. It passed as quickly as it came, but it lingered in their memory—like something they weren’t supposed to notice.

Then, gently, the figure lifted a small terracotta pot from the ground and placed it between them on the bench.

Inside: a brittle, forgettable little plant.

Three curled leaves. Pale green, tinged with dry brown at the tips.

The student blinked, glanced from the pot to the figure—about to nervously mumble something like Are you… allowed to be here?

But the figure spoke first.

“It responds in its own way.”

The tone wasn’t mysterious so much as matter-of-fact.

Like the kind of thing someone says before vanishing into a hedge.

Naturally, they did exactly that.

They stood, adjusted their coat with what felt like unnecessary elegance, and walked away.

Not urgently. Just… away.

They rounded the corner behind the hedge and didn’t come back.

The student sat there, with a jaded yet amused kind of intrigue.

The sort one develops after enough city bus rides with obnoxiously peculiar strangers.

They stared at the plant.

Then at the space where the figure had been.

Okay, they thought. Sure. Why not.

⸻

They took the pot home.

Not on a whim, but with the slightly stunned commitment of someone who now accepts the weirdness of a situation just a little too easily.

They cleared a space on the desk.

Set the pot under the reading lamp.

Stared at it like it might introduce itself.

For the next few days, they tried to act normal about it.

Water.

Light.

Quiet background music.

They even turned the pot slightly each morning, as if the plant had a creative opinion on its placement in the room.

Nothing changed.

But it didn’t die either.

It just sat there, unchanged and maybe a little smug about it.

The student wasn’t a botanist.

They weren’t even good with succulents.

Yet, curiosity began to quietly bloom in them, the way it often does when something strange refuses to explain itself.

They found themselves thinking about it at odd times—in the quiet moments before sleep, or while zoning out during lectures. They bought better soil, sat through overly earnest videos about optimal water pH levels, and even tried talking to it once, in the hesitant tone you’d use with a cat that might scratch you.

Days slipped by.

A week passed. Then two.

Yet the plant remained perfectly, stubbornly unchanged. 

Gradually, it began to occupy more space in their mind than was probably healthy.

They started to feel vaguely judged by it.

More than once, they questioned why they cared so much. 

But there was something about its silence—its refusal to wilt or thrive or explain itself-and its surreal introduction to the student, that was almost aggravating.

⸻

The snap happened late one night.

They’d been at their desk for hours, wilting in front of their computer, working on a paper that felt like it was resisting them.

Their eyes glazed over as they stared into the stillness of the room—until the plant caught their eye.

Still there.

Still nothing.

They reached for it in frustration, as though to throw it out.

They stood up—hands around the pot—just to feel something.

But they didn’t.

They just stood there, tired of nothing happening.

They resigned to place the plant back under the inertial spotlight of the desk lamp.

Tired eyes and weary fingers misjudged the placement, however, and it landed on the desk unevenly—settling with an uncomfortable thud.

One leaf bent too far.

A papery tear whispered into the silence.

The student froze.

It wasn’t intentional,

but it wasn’t exactly an accident either.

They stared at the torn edge for a long time as the air in the room felt thinner.

Eventually, they went to bed,

feeling like they’d kicked a puppy.

The next day, they tried to make up for it.

Fresh soil.

Balanced water.

A little extra light.

None of it seemed to help, of course.

They weren’t even sure what “helping” would look like.

But then—days later—there it was.

A new shoot.

Bright. Green. Clean-lined.

It had grown from the point of the tear.

The student leaned in, squinting at it like it might vanish if they looked too directly.

They said nothing.

But took a picture and saved it in a locked note on their phone.

They didn’t know why they locked it.

Only that they didn’t want anyone else to see it.

⸻

They kept going after that.

Not like a scientist.

More like testing the surface of a frozen pond—light pressure here, a tap there—listening for cracks.

They didn’t quite repeat the outburst.

Just small, careful tests.

A scratch.

A nick.

A soft bend.

Always something minor.

And every time—after a few days, or sometimes longer—the plant responded.

The scars remained,

but they didn’t look like damage.

More like accidental design,

as though the plant found its own logic in what had happened.

The student never told anyone.

It didn’t feel like something you told.

Not because it was precious,

or secret,

or profound—

but because explaining it out loud would make it sound ridiculous.

It wasn’t ridiculous.

Not in here.

Not when you were the one watching it happen.

⸻

The plant still sits on the desk.

The student still isn’t sure what to make of it.

But they’ve stopped needing an answer.

The plant has long outgrown its pot.

Vines trail behind the lamp

and curl around the spine of half-read books.

Its shape is chaotic now,

but not messy.

It grows where it must.

And in the stillness of the room,

beneath the quiet hum of the desk lamp,

it continues to respond.

March 5th, 2025

Nearly thirty years into my existence, and I find myself once again sculpting a day by doing mostly nothing. Time slips through my fingers, and I wonder what it means to build something lasting with a material that erases itself by design.

When I was younger, my dad used to criticize me for wasting entire afternoons watching TV. I remember one day when I was sixteen: he left in the morning while I lay on my side, still in pajamas, the glow of SpongeBob reruns flickering across my face. When he returned hours later, I hadn’t moved—not an inch. He pulled me aside, the scent of his aftershave cutting through the stale popcorn air of the living room.

“Time is finite,” he said, his voice fraying at the edges. “No one knows how much they have, but every day, that number gets smaller. Every hour you waste is an hour you won’t get back. Don’t let too many slip away.”

Ironically, that was the last year I saw him in person. For a decade, I’ve been gifted excuses instead of visits: bad timing, no money, poor health. The math is simple—the hours we have left to spend together now are much fewer than the ones we wasted then. And I can’t help but wonder if they’ll run out before we get to spend them.

Today, I spent the afternoon in bed, horizontal, watching Pantheon. The show asks, “What is consciousness? What makes a life?” I ask my ceiling, “Was today a waste?”

The answer depends on who you’re asking.

Lately, my life feels like a miniature version of this country’s unraveling. We’re both clinging to fraying ropes of stability, both drowning in debates about whose hands are on the oars while the ship takes on water. Three months ago, my job disappeared. Not laid off—dissolved, like the sugar in my morning coffee.

For years, I had worked through pain, pushing past the ache as my body protested. My job didn’t fire me for it, but it didn’t spare me either. When it disappeared, all that remained was an achier body and an empty space where my income used to be.

I would have kept working—I had been, forcing my body forward, wading against the tide — survival had always demanded it. But when the job vanished, so did my ability to pretend I had a choice.

At the last second, I clawed my way onto disability. Not because I was unwilling to work, but because the system leaves no bridge between “employed” and “extinct.”

I filled out the forms in a haze of indignation, my pen hovering over questions that asked if I was incapable of contributing.

I wanted to write: Isn’t everyone, in a machine that grinds us down and calls it laziness?

The checks buy me time — but only until April 30th. Two weeks past thirty. Two weeks past some imaginary threshold where I was supposed to have figured it all out.

I tell myself I should fight. Claw. Scrape. But fight whom? The algorithm that filters my résumé into the void? The economy that treats us like disposable parts? I send applications into silence.

No one sees them.

No one answers.

So here I am: lying back on a deck chair, joint in hand, the iceberg on the horizon swelling daily—a jagged monument to collective denial. The passengers and crew argue about its size, its origin, whether it’s even real. Others kneel, resigning our fate to their gods’ will. I’ve stopped leaning in to listen.

On days like this, as the hours pass like grains in an hourglass, dropping in sync with the start of each new episode, I agonize over my father’s wisdom.

But what if we’re all just sand paintings—intricate for a moment, shaped by experience, molded by the people we meet and the choices we make? Our hands etch stories into the grit, laboring to believe they’ll outlast the wind. But no matter how deeply we feel, love, want, hurt—our component parts disperse into the world, material for the next painting.

My father warned me not to waste my hours.

But what if they were never mine to waste?

And maybe there’s beauty in that too—the surrender to being both sculptor and sand.