The Tide Doesn’t Wait

Written for Thursday Inspiration #324 –
“Gentle On My Mind”. Here’s my response.

For this week’s Thursday Inspiration, Jim Adams asks us to respond to the challenge by using the prompt word “memory”, or by means of the song “Gentle on My Mind” by Glen Campbell or by going with another song by him, or a song about loving someone from a distance and keeping fond memories of them, or a song about a drifter who is reminiscing about a lost love.

Here is my story.

The Tide Doesn’t Wait

He came in on a Thursday, the way storms do …. without notice. Salt-worn jacket, eyes the color of deep water, a name he offered like something he’d borrowed: Dax.

Melody watched him from behind the counter of her father’s bait shop, pretending not to. She’d seen drifters before. This coast collected them the way it collected driftwood …. beautiful, purposeless, shaped by somewhere else entirely.

But Ash was different, and that was the lie she told herself to justify everything that followed.

Three weeks. That was all. Three weeks of his hands finding hers in the dark, of walking the breakwater at midnight, of him whispering things into her hair that felt like promises but carried no weight. She knew …. God, she knew …. even as she pressed her face against his chest and listened to his heartbeat like it was something she could memorize and keep.

He left on a Sunday. Of course he did. Sundays were made for leaving.

She didn’t chase him. She stood on the dock and let the morning take him, watched his silhouette dissolve into the grey throat of the horizon. She told herself she was fine. She told herself this for four months, and by December she almost believed it.

Then January came hard off the water, and she saw him.

He was standing at the far end of Market Street, collar up, bag on his shoulder, headed somewhere that wasn’t here. He turned …. just once …. and across fifty yards of bitter wind their eyes locked.

He didn’t stop.

She didn’t expect him to.

But the way he looked at her …. aching, helpless, ruined …. told her everything she’d needed to know all along.

Some men love you completely. They just can’t stay.

My song choice this week is all about regret, especially the regret of not sticking around and telling someone you love them or treating them as they deserved.

This is “Always On My Mind” by Willie Nelson