Fog

Her footsteps died, but she wasn't over. I still remembered her, and so did the melted snow on which she'd fallen on and spread her arms and legs out, like a splayed bird, and created an angel. The grass was still pressed down in the shape of a foot from that summer, where she'd stood for hours and kissed my blistered, sunburned fingertips and my chapped lips. Each blade was still creased in the middle so that when you crouched down and ran your palm over it, it bounced up into an upside down L, for love. She'd left her mark somewhere, an indelible I was here and that twelve fingered fog contour around all of it.

Maybe it'll clear sometime. It always does, when you breathe on that crooked cracked mirror and write believe in the mist, and your finger comes away cut and bloody. Do you dissolve, then? Do you find out you aren't real, but a memory or an echo?

This is what I know for sure: waves can wash away sand castles. They can wash away fragments too, maybe footsteps. But they can't touch memories.