The Tide That Took His Shape

After Julian died, I found solace in the strangest of places: the tide pools behind Aunt Maren’s cottage on the Oregon coast. He had loved that stretch of black sand, the way the fog rolled in like a second ocean. In my dreams, he came to me often—always on that same shore, always laughing, his hand warm in mine as we walked the waterline. I woke from those visits with salt on my lips and peace in my chest, as if death were just a thin curtain we could slip through when the world was quiet.

But last night’s dream was different. The shore was there, but the tide was out farther than I’d ever seen, exposing a slick, dark expanse of mud and rock. No fog, no gulls, no wind. Just the sound of water dripping somewhere unseen. I knew Julian was near—I could feel him like a pressure change before a storm—but he wasn’t walking beside me. Instead, a single tide pool glowed at the center of the emptiness, its surface impossibly still, like polished obsidian.

I knelt at its edge, drawn by a pull I couldn’t name. My reflection stared back, but it was wrong—my hair moved though there was no breeze, and my eyes were too dark, too patient. Then the reflection rippled, and Julian’s face surfaced beneath mine. Not his living face, not even his sleeping face, but something that borrowed his features the way a stranger borrows a coat. He smiled, and his lips moved without sound. I understood anyway: *Come in.*

I didn’t want to, but my hand was already in the water. The cold was not the cold of the ocean; it was the cold of a cellar, of something that had never seen the sun. The water climbed my wrist, my forearm, my elbow, not splashing but *absorbing* me, and I realized the pool was not a pool at all—it was an opening, a mouth that had been waiting for me to lean close. I tried to pull back, but my body was no longer mine. It was soft, yielding, like wet clay.

Julian’s face broke the surface then, his head rising without a ripple, his hair plastered to his skull. He looked at me with eyes that were not his—they were the color of old pennies, tarnished and flat. He spoke, and this time I heard it, a voice like water draining: ‘You said you’d follow me anywhere.’ I shook my head, but my neck moved like seaweed in a current. He reached for me, and I saw that his fingers were webbed, translucent, the bones visible like cracks in ice.

I woke with a gasp, my arm wet to the shoulder, the sheets soaked through. The room smelled of brine and rot. I stumbled to the bathroom, scrubbing my arm until it was raw, but the cold lingered in my bones. Aunt Maren found me on the floor at dawn, shivering, and she knew. She said nothing, just wrapped me in a quilt and made tea that tasted of ash.

That afternoon, I walked to the shore. The tide was out, and there it was—the same pool, the same impossible stillness. But now I saw the truth: the water wasn’t reflecting the sky. It was reflecting a room, a room with a single wooden chair, and a man sitting in it. Not Julian, but a man whose skin flowed like liquid, whose face changed from moment to moment—now Julian’s, now mine, now a stranger’s. He was waiting. And the water in the pool was not water; it was memory, heavy with all the shapes it had stolen.

I understood then what the dream meant. Julian wasn’t visiting me from beyond. Something had found his shape, his laughter, his warmth, and used them to lure me close. It had been waiting all along, patient as the tide, to add me to its collection. The peace I felt in those earlier dreams was not comfort—it was the seduction of something that wanted to wear me like a suit.

I haven’t slept since. Every time I close my eyes, I hear the drip, drip, drip of that pool, and I feel an ache in my bones, a longing to be liquid, to pour myself into that chair and forget my own name. Aunt Maren says I should leave, but I can’t. The tide pool is still there, shimmering in the distance, and I know that someday, when I’m too tired to fight, it will call me home—not as myself, but as its next shape, cast in the mold of the woman who loved too deeply and walked too close to the water’s edge.