The sand holds our faces. Every thousand grains forms a man, a woman, a child.
Every millionth there is your mother- young, stunning, beauty mark perfectly spotted on right cheek.
Every billionth adds a little weight, gray, tears and beaches of separation.
Every trillionth might be the dirt blown away at her funeral.
It’s not hard to find a thousand coffins nesting in the shoreline. You just need to adjust your eyes to focus on the tiny-ness below, to see every relative particle.
Sand is but the erosion of the once impenetrable.
You may find your father coasts away from your mother, his bald-headed frown etched into a tableaux of a thousand grains.
The semblance of your sister’s smile and your brother’s jeer not embracing each other are also there, shifting closer or farther away, based on the whims of tide and wind.
Your history has been etched into the grains centuries before your birth, yet your fate remains beyond their sway and maybe even time.
No one can explain why vast deserts exist. Why their very ash is forever tendered and remembered.
All we know is that the shifting sands will be there to always greet and bury us.