I just returned home from watching phosphorescent waves breaking on the shore in the dark.

It was so light and magical and my heart was so heavy.

My friend Jonathan told me today that it is a good thing when someone you love who wants to end things with you becomes remote because it allows them to become an object whom you can more easily relinquish. And I told him that that sounded very sensible, and that I wished it were true for me. Alas, in my experience, it is so disorienting when someone with whom I have forged our own, intimate way of communicating adopts the generic language of forsakers everywhere—“I need some time for me”; “I’m just not getting my needs met”—that what I feel is not disdain but rather, incredulity: “what did I do to make them speak this way?”

I was asking this question yesterday, I’m asking it today, I’ll be asking it tomorrow, and the answer will continue to elude me.

You know what’s less elusive? How to keep a wave upon the sand, as the children discovered tonight, stamping into the wet sand, and squealing with delight as the ground flared up for just a moment, under their feet.