The Beach

April is a complicated month.

There is so much to celebrate and yet so much to grieve. I have to admit that this April has hit me harder than I anticipated. And at the same time, this April has excited me in ways I never expected. Like I said, it’s complicated.

April holds two core parts of me—survivorhood and poetry. It’s Sexual Assault Awareness Month and National Poetry Month. In past years, I’ve shown up outwardly—at events, in community, in celebration. But this time, I’ve been quieter. More reflective. Keeping to myself.

After honoring 17-year-old Bre in February, something shifted. The ceremony was powerful, but it also stirred things I hadn’t felt in a while. Flashbacks. Old memories finding their way back to the surface. A reminder that PTSD and healing is not linear, and that some parts of me are still tender.

So instead of writing, instead of celebrating, I’ve been sitting with something else.

Grief.

There are two death anniversaries I mourn. The heaviest one being my childhood best friend. It’s been a year since her death but I still can’t accept that she’s gone—at least from this life. I get angry thinking about moments she’s missing. I cry when I revisit my favorite childhood memory of her—laughing and chasing each other on the Indiana Dunes Beach.

I thought of her on the beaches of San Diego. I looked for her in every sunrise. I found her in purple-sparkled seashells tucked in the sand beneath the waves of the ocean. I heard her laugh echo into the horizon during every sunset. And I wished I could go back in time—to live that beach day with her one last time.

The same way I wish I had more time with my Grandma Isabel. She loved the beach—from what others have told me and from the pictures I sifted through in her Bronx apartment in April 2024. It was hard, listening to the memories. The laughter. The sadness. The life of a woman I barely knew, yet felt deeply tethered to through the love and care she passed down to my mom.

Sitting on Ocean Beach in San Diego, I listened intently to the waves lapping the shore. I breathed in the salt water air and imagined my Grandma Isabel smiling into a camera—wisps of her dark hair blowing in the wind, waves rolling in the background. A wet beach littered with stones and seashells.

The same scene depicted in her obituary photo.

Walking in the cold water, sand squishing between my toes, I wondered if Grandma Isabel’s footprints were forever imprinted on the beaches she loved.

And I wondered if it was her footprints I felt pressing into the sand instead of my own.