The Space in Between
Where Memory Meets the Present
The beach was almost empty that day.
Tracks crossed the sand in every direction, cutting through one another before disappearing toward the water. Farther out, the surf held something less certain. Shapes appeared and faded in the softness of the exposure, as if the scene hadn't quite decided what it wanted to keep.
The shoreline remained, and the marks in the sand were still there, but the fishermen seemed to belong somewhere between the present moment and what had already passed. They had been there only moments before, solid and real. Then they moved, and the camera held onto them just a little longer.
Not completely present. Not completely gone.
There was something about that space between the two that stayed with me. We usually think of the past as something behind us, separate from the ground we stand on. But sometimes it lingers—a sudden sound, a familiar smile, a feeling. A presence that is still there, yet isn't. Memories hold that space in between. They won't always bring someone back clearly; sometimes they give us only a fragment. A fleeting expression or a phrase so familiar that, for just a second, the distance disappears.
The shore had already begun changing. The tide would soon smooth the sand, erasing the tracks until every physical trace was gone. And still, for a moment, the fishermen remained. Not because they were physically there, but because something of them had been remembered.
I call that the space in between. Not gone. Not here, but within me.
Absence is not necessarily the same thing as an ending.
For my Mother Ann
View Beyond the Viewfinder