The Pier Can't Always Keep You Where It Wants You To Be

You stand with your suitcase like a buoy, bright, bobbing in the shallows, and I am the pier— rooted, barnacled, smelling of old salt and rope. You tell me you’ll stay if I keep my hands wrapped round your ankles, but I know the tide you carry in your ribs. Even on windless days it pounds against my palms, shouting for the open mouth of the horizon. The gap is a sandbar— we could walk there together, let our knees sink into its damp skin, pretend it will hold us longer than a season. But I have seen what happens when the sea grows impatient. It chews through land like bread, swallows the footprints before we can name them. I want to say go after the storm has passed, when our nets are mended, when the gulls return to roost in my hair. But your moon is full now. It pulls at your water even when you swear it won’t. And I— I cannot anchor you without learning how to drown.