I am three in this photograph.

On the beach, I was raised there.

My sun hat dappled with periwinkle flowers,
the only clothing on my exposed, innocent frame.

In the sand I dug for treasure,
only happening upon a sand crab.
My brother and sister surfed the glassy waves.
Mother watched on with a cautious eye.

This beach, the cove, is my second home,
I am connected to the water,
and have been since the day I was born in it.

The cove is haunted by the dead bones of whales.
I stood on the sand, no knowledge of its past.
Feeling the warmth, the sun rays through the clouds,
unable to feel the pain of the sea mammals.

The cove holds my most fond memories in its sandy fist.
My first tumble in a kayak,
my first wetsuit swim,
my first cave of starfish reaching from the ceiling to the floor.

This beach stays the same as I grow.
The rocks come and go like the seaweed:
a cycle, marking my age.

The girl in this photo
doesn’t know that Johnny McElgunn will take me on a date to the cove 12 years later.
She is unaware that her brother will be chased by a savage pitbull there,
and the forever scarring image of her first naked man is yet to come.

This photo holds memories,
and while I stare into it,
I think of how at that age,
I knew nothing of what was to come.

This beach lives on, but the child in the picture is gone.
She sits here writing this,
detached to her younger self,
like a leaf gilding on the wind currents away from the tree.