Low tide confessions

The wind has teeth. I taste salt on my lips before the ocean even comes into view, and my eyes water - not from emotion but the way a cold slap to the face makes you tear up, automatic. The notebook in my hand weighs more than physics should allow. I check the cover: “Book of Mistakes.” It’s not the original title, but the rebranding happened when I started logging failures instead of feelings.

The trail is rutted into memory from generations of dogs and people with unfinished business. The beach is visible in bands between the clumps of ice plant and dune grass. The cliffs aren’t high, but the wind at the rim will pull your words out of your mouth if you forget to keep your lips tight.

I talk to God the way you might talk to a roommate you suspect of drinking your last beer. “Nice day for a reckoning,” I say, testing the reverb in the cove. The wind takes it and flings it back in my ear, distorted. I try again. “You got any last-minute edits for my obituary? Or should I just make something up?”

God, if listening, is not inclined to banter.

I breathe hard on purpose and let the air freeze my lungs. I imagine every molecule is a fragment of confession I haven’t delivered. The path gets muddy where water seeps from the bluff. My foot slips and slides, landing a brown streak up my shin. I consider this a kind of baptism. Unintentional, but probably on-brand.

I watch a gull pick at the corpse of something unidentifiable at the tideline. It’s efficient, methodical, a lesson in commitment. I envy that. The notebook knocks against my thigh with every other step, like a persistent regret.

I talk louder, trying to shame the ocean into responding. “I’d like to return this,” I shout, holding up the notebook like it’s a bomb or a prize.

At the last crest, I stop to catch my breath. The edge is closer than I thought. Seventy feet of nothing, then rocks, then foam.

I keep my pace measured, arms locked at my sides to keep the notebook from falling. There’s no one else on the shore. If I disappear, the world will keep spinning.

The “Book of Mistakes” is even heavier now. My therapist said, “If you’re going to make a ritual of self-destruction, at least make it yours.” So I did. I am both patient and doctor, defendant and judge. There’s freedom in playing every role, even if the only audience is wind and brine.

The salt in my eyes is from the wind, I swear.

“I’m here to delete myself.” I say. “By chapter, not by blood.”

I count to three. Then I open the notebook.

The paper sticks to itself, gluey from mist and thumb-sweat, but I manage to flatten out a page enough to read. My voice is steadier now, almost detached, like I’m the stenographer at my own trial.

“Item one,” I announce, “I never learned to swim. Stopped trying after middle school.”

The ocean burps up a chunk of kelp by way of response.

“Item two. I slept with my best friends boyfriend. I regret the second time more than the first.”

I flick to a later page and read it without volume, lips moving like prayer.

“I told my sister she was dramatic for being scared of the water.

She said she’d prove me wrong.

She jumped first.

I laughed - until she didn’t come up.

They called it an accident.

Nobody heard me dare her.

I’ve been fast-talking ever since, trying to drown the sound of that silence."

The wind picks up, knocking the book sideways. I snap it shut, hold it in both hands for a minute. It’s still warm from my body. Not for long.

I take a step closer to the drop, knees bent, feet digging into the mud for traction. I hold the Book up like a sacrifice and say, “Do your worst.”

On three, I hurl it. The wind tries to intercept, but it’s heavier than it looks, and my arm follows through, tight with Catholic guilt. The notebook arcs, end over end, a perfect parabola of self-loathing, and slaps down onto the sand below. Not the ocean, but close enough. For a moment, it sits there, blue cover bright against the beach’s rotten teeth. Then a lazy wave comes in and drags it seaward, page by reluctant page.

I expect poetry, or at least symbolism. What I get is a wet thud and the notebook bobbing in circles, clinging to the tideline like a drunk to a barstool.

I stand on the bluff, hands in my pockets, waiting for the next act. The wind pushes me sideways. My jacket flaps open, and my skin prickles with goosebumps, but I don’t move.

I try to turn away, but the notebook is still there, spinning in place, refusing to leave the scene. I feel watched, and not just by the Almighty. It’s as if the waves themselves are keeping score.

“Fine,” I say. “I’ll wait.”

The clouds clump together, thick and ready to burst. Down below, a gull lands near the notebook and eyes it with the same suspicion I have for people who say they "enjoy" yoga. The gull stabs at the cover, tears a corner, then gets bored and flies off. The wind presses at my back, but I plant my feet harder.

Time passes in strange increments. A car horn honks far off, and I wonder who’s honking at who, and if either of them is happy. I wonder if anyone has ever been happy in the history of this bluff.

Eventually, the notebook is gone. Sucked under or pulled out to open water, I can’t tell. I feel neither relief nor regret, just an absence. A minor character has exited the stage.

I almost leave, but then something in the periphery snags me. A patch of blue, impossibly familiar, riding the crest of a small wave, headed right for the rocks at the base of the bluff.

The odds of it being my notebook are slim, but I have a long track record of being the statistical outlier. The wave lifts it, then drops it hard onto a ledge below. It stays put, as if nailed there. Beckoning.

I mutter, “Oh, come on.” I’m half-expecting God to cackle, but He’s gone quiet. Maybe this is beneath His dignity. Maybe He’s busy somewhere else, or maybe this is what He lives for.

I pick my way down the slick goat trail that loops to the beach. My boots slide on wet grass; my knees bark in protest.

The ocean up close is less impressive. It smells like iodine and rotten spinach. The blue patch is definitely a notebook. Same cover, same spiral binding, even the same brand logo in the lower right: “Top Flight,” as if it ever was.

I grab it. My fingers leave wet prints on the cover. I pop it open to a random page and stare.

The handwriting is not mine.

I check the cover, the inside flap. No name, no address, just page after page of tight, fast script that isn’t mine. I flip through: lists, jokes, confessions. It’s the same book, but rewritten by someone else. Someone who knows my tricks, my rhythms, my compulsions.

My anger goes out of me like a slow leak. It’s replaced by disbelief which grows into something else: curiosity.

I read a few lines at random.

“Dear God: If you’re real, I hope you’re drunk right now. If not, please disregard.”

“My therapist said I should stop catastrophizing. I told her I was just reporting the news.”

For a second, the only sound is the wet click of the spiral binding as I squeeze. I look up at the bluff, at the sky gone bruised with coming rain, and I feel my pulse knocking in my throat, louder than the surf.

I think, maybe this is what it feels like to be listened to.

The rain waits until I’m seated before it starts, like it wants to witness me coming apart in increments. I claim a rock above the tide line, knees tucked, notebook in my lap, and let the needles of cold water drill through my jacket and into the marrow. The ocean is closer now, more intimate. Every seventh wave stretches far enough to kiss my boots.

I flip the notebook open, half expecting the ink to have run, for the words to be bled into anonymity. But the hand is neat, sharp. Somebody who knows how to write for a bad light and worse weather. I scan a line, and it nearly knocks me over.

“Sometimes I pray to nobody because nobody listens better.”

I read it aloud, just to prove it isn’t a trick of wet paper or wishful thinking. My voice is a mess. Clogged with old tears, rusted from salt, but it does the job. The sentence floats out and returns, twice as heavy, bouncing off the waves and the bruise-colored sky.

More pages. More confessions, tight and neat as crossword clues.

“I love the smell of rain on concrete. It’s the only thing that makes me think tomorrow might not be a rerun.”

“I am only at peace in airports. Nobody expects you to stay, or to be yourself.”

I laugh, once, hard enough to startle a gull into flight. I press a palm over my mouth, but the laugh turns inside out and becomes something else. My face is wet, and I’m not sure it’s just the rain. It’s embarrassing, but there’s nobody around to see, not even God. He’s checked out, leaving me with a growing suspicion that the universe is running out of original material.

I flip another page. The last entry is short, ink bleeding from the wet, but still readable:

“Don’t rush to fix the silence.

Sadness isn’t a fault - it’s proof you still hear.

The light means nothing

to those who’ve never sat in the dark.

Stay.

Let it ache

until it hums.”

I close the book and hold it to my heart. My heartbeat is the only metronome. Everything else is either drowning or dissolving.

The rain intensifies, a curtain of white noise that erases the rest of the world. I sit there, feeling the weight of the notebook, the weight of the voice inside it. My sarcasm doesn’t even try to fight back. This is too tender, too raw for irony.

I stand, knees stiff, back popping, and tuck the notebook inside my jacket. It’s cold and wet against my ribs, but I’m not letting go. Not now.

I walk home. My heart thrums, nervous and alive.

Behind me, the ocean keeps reading. Keeps returning. Keeps listening.