text: He took off his shoes, and strode out onto the beach. He loved the feeling of the soft sand crumbling beneath his soles, the waves gently caressing his toes. The salty spray of the sea. The wet sand glimmered in the distance invitingly. He wondered if it would be the same half a world away. Repulse bay. He lived just a bus ride away when he was a child. Innumerable summer days were spent here, playing in the sand, trying and failing to reach the floating platform far away from the shore, getting yelled at by mom for not wearing sunscreen... Now he was moving away, to the point where it would take a plane ride to revisit this memory from the other life he lived. Being a Thursday afternoon in the scorching summer sun, not many people decided to be at the beach. He mostly had the whole beach to himself. Maybe it spoke to the bias of his memories, but summer days became more and more blisteringly hot over the years. The air became so humid it was suffocating. It felt incompatible with life. He sympathized with the palm tree, its leaves drooping over the ocean, shaking in the breeze half-heartedly like a worker pretending to work and awaiting retirement. At least he could leave. The first time he was here, his mom brought a small bucket with her so he could use it to build a sandcastle. It was no work of art, really just five bucketfuls of sand that protruded out of the ground. He had to defend it against the older, meaner kids who kept trying to topple his castle and dethrone him. He fought tooth and nail to preserve it, throwing his outstretched hands onto three kids practicing their imaginary world cup scoring routine on the castle, while his mom fell asleep in the shade under a tree. But all he had to show for it were scratches, bruises, and the unmistakable memory of three craters in the otherwise undisturbed sand. It was a delusion he had, that if he could stop the kids destroying his work it could stand for years to come. But of course, when he returned the next day it was gone, disintegrating under the red sun and swept away by the waves. A borrowed place on borrowed time. He found a shaded patch and sat down, staring out towards the sea. In the distance, he could make out a couple of seagulls, circling a sailboat, looking for a safe place to land. It seems like the search for hospitable land is a tradition, happening since the first plankton slid down a few nanometers, and will go on until the end of time. He thought about the ship of Theseus. Is a boat really the same boat if all its parts were replaced? Or, for that matter, is a city? Out of sentimentality, he built another sandcastle. Without any tools, he gently folded up his sleeves, walked down to the water's edge and scooped some sand together, sprinkling in some water to give it shape. Two things that decidedly do not mix, the sand and the water, momentarily came together to form something so beautiful, so delicate. This sort of beauty was never going to last. His creation was a castle, complete with four towers and something that resembled a wall surrounding the main block. He sat and watched as the waves lapped away at the nearest tower against the crimson of the sunset, removing some bits of sand from his construction. Soon it will all be nothing. One by one, they all just faded away. As he bent down to pick up his bag, he noticed that the legs of his pants were wet, and specks of sand littered his legs. Against the black pants he was wearing, it seemed almost like stars in the night sky, one he could never see through the choking yellow street lamps of Kowloon. He gently patted it, and some fell off while others remained ever so tightly bonded to his pants. He remembered another time when he wore long pants to the beach as a child, and the sand clung onto his pants leg. When he noticed it, he went back into the sea to wash it off, and to his credit it was no longer there. But when he walked up the beach to rejoin his friends, new sand was flicked back up and his pants leg was dotted with sand once more. He ran down to water a few more times, but this kept happening, no matter how much he tried to minimize his movements. He tried to walk slowly so the sand would not bounce up onto his pants, he tried to run so there was less opportunity for the sand to jump onto him, he even tried to walk sideways for some reason. He could not explain it now, but he felt it was sure to work in his youth. As much as he tried to get rid of it, the sand always reappeared. For weeks afterwards, his mom kept finding bits of sand at home. Mom twisted his ear until it became red, and sent him to bed early. Of course, an hour-long lecture was inevitable. She would reschedule the end of humanity to tell him off. All over some sand that wouldn’t go away. And perhaps that is the way it is. You can try to erase everything, but some things just do not perish easily. You could scrub and scrub and it would still be there. Small parts of it will remain, and will continue to exist in the crevices you never thought about. And when he finally settled into his new home thousands of miles away, putting away the last cardboard box, he still found sand in his house. He picked some up with his finger, holding it up to the light to examine it. And when he remembered where the sand came from, he smiled. \ For more like this, please visit our sub r/RedTideStories.