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…the moon pulls at heart strings it will never touch. This is what love does, during a low tide. The oceans obey without understanding, no need for interpretation rising and retreating like arguments, quarrels that resemble quiet resistance no one remembers starting. We call this romance, or madness because surrender sounds better than gravity. Someone asks how I am and I say fine, strange this Reticence we Reserve which is a philosophical position: that endurance requires manners, not truth. Love arrives the way an Arctic storm does uninvited, ill-timed, and certain it has the right. finding fortunes warmth in even coldest weathers It rearranges the furniture of the soul, floods rooms in the mind we had sealed, then leaves behind shattered windows, and a silence that smells of memories, mixed in quiet despairs. Plato said something once, probably, about halves and longing, but the body knows better: we are but animal and animal is but us. it knows tides, knows pull, knows the ache of leaning the taste of loves sweet nectar, it knows the bitter taste of love lost especially toward what will not stay. Despair is not the opposite of love. It is love’s sediment, what settles when the water withdraws It lies there, quiet, looking harmless, until you step into it barefoot. I keep my face arranged correctly. This is ethics. This is social philosophy. This is how we prevent the world from noticing the crack in the hull. The sun arrives, tired of explanation, keeps burning anyway. A foolish commitment, but admirable. Sometimes I believe love is simply the refusal to stop orbiting another thing, even when the orbit decays, even when the math is wrong, even when the fall has begun, there we are. Sometimes I believe it is only chemistry wearing a poem for a coat, a stolen metaphor as a hat, infatuation in its finest, until the novelty wears off. Both beliefs hurt equally, which suggests they are true. or false , but still truth in it's own. At night the moon counts my losses in tides I did not ask for, they cry into pools, where stars and galaxies find new shelter along shores battered, timeless moss clings to rock holding them, gentle reminders and the sea inside me roars then answers, obedient, exhausted, alive. If I say I am fine, it is because language has no unit for the distance between wanting and keeping, or moving and standing still, I'm not sure which it is, Polite concealment, Social anesthesia, Or Stoic minimisation. Does it really matter in the end ? The philosophers built temples in hills and bridges of thought over this water. and we still drown beneath it. The equinox comes. and we dance for the unknown, under the harvest moon, love listens to the tide go out. The wreckage is polite, arranged, easy to step around, sand is like that, the slow decay of forgotten syllables of a dead language – This is love, I think: when a mind is lost in indecisive peril, but you standing afterward, soaked, smiling, pretending the ocean was gentle. And this is life: learning to love what undoes us without letting anyone hear the water in our voice, as we walk along trying to find love, during low tide, under our own desolate sky.
0
Jan 23
Jan 23, 2026 at 8:37 AM UTC
MalcolmG
Love During a Low Tide
…the moon pulls at heart strings it will never touch. This is what love does, during a low tide. The oceans obey without understanding, no need for interpretation rising and retreating like arguments, quarrels that resemble quiet resistance no one remembers starting. We call this romance, or madness because surrender sounds better than gravity. Someone asks how I am and I say fine, strange this Reticence we Reserve which is a philosophical position: that endurance requires manners, not truth. Love arrives the way an Arctic storm does uninvited, ill-timed, and certain it has the right. finding fortunes warmth in even coldest weathers It rearranges the furniture of the soul, floods rooms in the mind we had sealed, then leaves behind shattered windows, and a silence that smells of memories, mixed in quiet despairs. Plato said something once, probably, about halves and longing, but the body knows better: we are but animal and animal is but us. it knows tides, knows pull, knows the ache of leaning the taste of loves sweet nectar, it knows the bitter taste of love lost especially toward what will not stay. Despair is not the opposite of love. It is love’s sediment, what settles when the water withdraws It lies there, quiet, looking harmless, until you step into it barefoot. I keep my face arranged correctly. This is ethics. This is social philosophy. This is how we prevent the world from noticing the crack in the hull. The sun arrives, tired of explanation, keeps burning anyway. A foolish commitment, but admirable. Sometimes I believe love is simply the refusal to stop orbiting another thing, even when the orbit decays, even when the math is wrong, even when the fall has begun, there we are. Sometimes I believe it is only chemistry wearing a poem for a coat, a stolen metaphor as a hat, infatuation in its finest, until the novelty wears off. Both beliefs hurt equally, which suggests they are true. or false , but still truth in it's own. At night the moon counts my losses in tides I did not ask for, they cry into pools, where stars and galaxies find new shelter along shores battered, timeless moss clings to rock holding them, gentle reminders and the sea inside me roars then answers, obedient, exhausted, alive. If I say I am fine, it is because language has no unit for the distance between wanting and keeping, or moving and standing still, I'm not sure which it is, Polite concealment, Social anesthesia, Or Stoic minimisation. Does it really matter in the end ? The philosophers built temples in hills and bridges of thought over this water. and we still drown beneath it. The equinox comes. and we dance for the unknown, under the harvest moon, love listens to the tide go out. The wreckage is polite, arranged, easy to step around, sand is like that, the slow decay of forgotten syllables of a dead language – This is love, I think: when a mind is lost in indecisive peril, but you standing afterward, soaked, smiling, pretending the ocean was gentle. And this is life: learning to love what undoes us without letting anyone hear the water in our voice, as we walk along trying to find love, during low tide, under our own desolate sky.
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