In the fresh, California summer air, with the crisp sea salts imprinting on your cheeks and in your pores, you drag along in the dampened sand a cast-away tree branch that you found lying in the gutter outside the front of your house. You etch a raggedy line over a mile of beach, and you like to think that you are leaving a trace of you on the world, with the sand that you've left upturned and the sunken caves where your heels dug deep down into the moist earth.

You don't remember that overtime the tide
will wash away the momentary traces of you.

On the dock you've made a pile of miscellaneous and abstracted stones that didn't quite fit with the prettier pebbles and shells that you found lying amidst the rubble of the ocean's floor. Each night, just as the water begins to devour the sun, you sit at the edge of the dock and send your flat headed stones skipping out into the deep, where you believe you are setting them free.

You don't realize that the tide is chaining
the rocks to the beach, and that in a few days,
you'll find them washed up on the shore – mangled.

As you lie in bed, at night, alone, you unfold delicate memories in your mind, and you come across the one that brings tears to your eyes. Your father flashes in your mind, and he holds you close, tightly as he can, and whispers graceful, dying words that sink into you like your anomaly of stone and cut through you like the stick in the sand. He tells you that the most unbelievable things contain a sort of magic that can stir the world, if you just believe they can.

You don't realize that your father's words
lay the path that make you the wishful girl that
skips rocks and accompanies the tree branches for the
benefit of the sticks and stones that otherwise lie unknown.