It’s Friday, which is supposed to mean something—and I suppose it does, to those people. The ones I imagine still belong to the Thank-God-It’s-Friday congregation. Their voices rise like smoke from a distant fire I can no longer smell.

But at fifty-seven, when there’s so little left to kill, Friday arrives like fog along a beach. It covers the shoreline you thought you knew, the one mapped in your chest with all the certainty of youth. Then the fog withdraws. First light touches everything. The coastline reveals itself as if for the first time, and you understand: it is different. It has always been different.

The continual erosion. The reshaping. Each wave makes something new in the moment after the moment before. But the substantial things remain—driftwood bleached white as bone, kelp in dark tangles, sometimes a seal washed up and sour with decay, bloated with gases that make you afraid to light a match. These objects sit motionless on the shore, placed in one direction or another, each with its own small gravitational field of obstacles.

I once found a sand dollar. Turned it over in my palm like currency from a country that no longer exists. A barnacle clung to the underside, desperate and eternal. It changed the sand dollar—changed its worth, maybe. After all, a thing is only worth what another is willing to pay, and who pays for damaged goods?

The barnacle had embossed its mark into the surface, a sea-plant imprint, anti-counterfeiting methodology for sand pretending to be dollars. I thought about the barnacle’s folly—mistaking this disc for something solid, something permanent. Clinging to it through currents and storms, ending up miles from wherever it first called home. A land foreign to itself, foreign to me, the passerby on this ever-changing shore.

I held it thinking: value in rarity, in being different. Then I found another. Then another. Without thought, I put down the first one I’d found. It had become a burden to carry. The specialness of this monetary leech—a one-in-a-billion consideration, now just another thing to discard.

I walk a little further. The soft tide rolls around bare ankles, reminds me of the coolness in the ocean, how in its vastness change comes slowly. A single degree requires heating quadrillions of gallons—whatever the Google number is—and the same thermal mass must surrender that degree in reverse. When you’re navigating along the surface of this giant, even trying to change direction meets little resistance but hinders the turning. I’m sure there’s irony in this, but I’m too lazy to excavate it. Instead I think of aircraft carriers pivoting on the face of the Pacific. I find the irony instantly—how long it takes to turn something this large on something larger, with a contradictory name. War and Peace, but that’s been taken already.

But back to me. The sand. The ever-changing shoreline. The newness of each day and the obstacles arranged within it like furniture in a stranger’s house.

The fog is beginning to roll away now. I must decide where to go next, even if the decision is simply to stand still. Even standing still is a decision.

Decide. Will. Decide.

The tide continues its work. The shoreline continues its forgetting.