An Old Day

Early September, we decide on the coast.

Your windbreaker smells like lemon balm and old books.

I follow you barefoot through shingle,

collecting gull cries in my throat.

The sea is grey-green and mother-heavy,

burdened, inevitable

swollen gravity chewing the horizon, slow yet certain.

You say this is what faith looks like,

motion without motive,

grief that repeats itself until it smooths.

I write the tide times in the sand,

watch you cup your hands full of foam,

salt threading the lines of your palm like an old promise.

The café above the cliff only serves instant coffee and disappointment.

You stir sugar in with a plastic stick, say storms are just another kind of symmetry.

Your eyes are shipwrecks. Mine are anchors. We don’t meet in the middle.

Back at the beach, we name waves after old friends,

the ones with the chipped tooth and soft apologies.

Each one hits your knees, then mine,

a rhythm neither of us knows how to keep.

That night, I dream of the sea filling our apartment.

It seeps through sockets, swells in the dinged kettle,

folds over the couch,

a quilt stitched from every unfinished sentence.

You float through the hallway,

murmuring something about driftwood and destiny.

I wake to your absence,

a note on the fridge held by the magnet shaped like a whale.

I open all the windows. The curtains inhale like lungs.

Outside, gulls scream a hymn only the salt understands.

I make tea. Pour an extra cup. Leave it steaming.

Tide always returns. Even when we don’t.

Aditya is a 17-year-old from a very small, very quiet town in Portugal. He loves old stories, even older symphonies, and sometimes plays the part of an old soul who lugs around heavy books and quotes Proust, partly for the wisdom, partly for the effect.