The Weight of Salt and Sand

I keep a small, smooth stone in my desk drawer, pulled from the shoreline of a beach I haven’t visited in twenty years. It is cold to the touch, worn down by the constant, rhythmic labor of the tide until it feels like a secret held in the palm. We spend our lives collecting these fragments—a shell, a ticket stub, a handful of sand—trying to anchor ourselves to the fleeting lightness of being young. There is a particular ache in remembering how it felt to have nothing to carry but the sun on your shoulders and the salt drying on your skin. We are always trying to archive the joy that refuses to sit still, pinning it down with memory as if we could stop the clock from turning. But the tide eventually claims everything, and we are left only with the residue of what once was. What remains of a summer afternoon when the wind has long since carried the laughter away?

Jose Juniel Rivera-Negron has captured this beautiful, suspended moment in his photograph titled The Pretty Girl on the Beach. It reminds me that even when the tide pulls back, the brightness of a single, unburdened smile stays with us. Does this image stir a memory of a shore you once called home?