Building was the fun part. Discovering the perfect sand to water ratio for building. Constructing the turrets, digging the moat. The discovery that, though yards away from the sea, if you dug deeply enough, water would magically appear.
When he opened the bedroom door, he saw what he had imagined he would see when he heard them from the hallway. Coming home early to surprise his wife had not been a good idea after all. In one moment, his nine year marriage was washed away, crumbling like a sandcastle in a wave.
Fairytales are really popular. Even for people who are young at heart. Fairytales, they help us broaden our imagination. Especially prinecesses, kings, fairygodmothers, castles, princes. They make us believe in our dreams and make them come true.
Sandcastles, when you were at the beach, playing. Making a unique artwork, inspired by fairytales.
Little kids like to make sandcastles at the beach. Build motes around them to keep the waves from destroying their fragile masterpieces. I never had the patience to build a proper sandcastle. Squirming around in the sand was my idea of a day at the beach.
We walked along the shoreline, dodging sandcastles and their tiny architects as well as the salty spray from the waves. We didn’t speak, not for the longest time, and the sound of our footsteps, muted though they were by the hard-packed sand beneath our feet, seemed far too loud in the silence. The crash of the waves rolled like thunder in our ears and the light summer breeze whistled like a thousand arrows as it passed us.
I put my thoughts in a tiny box. I tucked them away, built walls around them, put a roof over them. Then the tide came and washed the walls and the roof and my thoughts away. And I could build a real castle, a real castle with you.
Sandcastle
build me up
on a hot summers day
when the sky is lit,
and the water sways.
a bucket or two
is all i require,
but use what you got,
and you’ll be inspired
———————————
I’ll retain my shape
if you pat my bones
It’s a tangled up mess
what i call home
She looked up from the tower, watching the dragon fly through the air and seeing her knights attempts to fend the beat off. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Amelia thought as she looked up at the once-gentle creature blowing fire over the kingdom. Getting up from her bed, she marched out of her bedroom doors – ignoring her guards’ objections – and found her way to the highest balcony in the castle. After calling upon her inner – “Amy? Amy I said it’s time to go! I know you’re having fun darling but it’s starting to get chilly.” Sighing, Amy took one last look at the marvelous sandcastle she had constructed and said goodbye to that particular realm of her imagination until another day, before turning back and taking her mom’s outstretched hand.
I see the children, listlessly playing in the sand, building their lop-sided sand castles. Castles that will stand tall(ish), be abandoned, then washed away with the salty tide.
When i was little i would always make sandcastles at the beach. they were always my favourite thing to do. and i actually kind of miss them, but i dont think its the sandcastles u actually miss. i think its my child hood that i actually miss. i miss all the drama free nature and the laughs and the tiny booboos on your skin. now life is full of drama, sometimes laughter but mostly crying. and its full of booboo on the inside not the outside and i think thats worse
It is time for sandcastles again. A seasonal event in San Diego, a place of no seasons. Crowds flock, the beaches completely blocked by endless streams of people, like ski slopes at the peak of winter.
I built a castle to represent our dreams, but it washed away with the sea. Just a few shells remain. I pocketed them to remind me of that day. That day at the sea.
I built sandcastles and made up sand people. I created a sand world. Then the ocean came, and washed everything else. The sand world was as fragile as my real world. Anything can come along and destroy everything.
sitting on the beach she watched the waves beat against the sand as the tide moved in. some children’s sandcastles were slowly being eroded, just like her life she felt.
When you are younger you play in the sand every time that your family goes to the beach. Your mother would put you in a tiny bathing suit that had polka dots on it. Your brother would kick the sand in your face. You would spend hours on just one tiny sand castle that you loved. Your mother would look at it and laugh. The beach was never much fun.
My kids… My kids in the sand.. she’s been making this sand castle for 30 minutes now and It still is nothing but when he knocks it over it’s like world war 3. How can he live without his babies? how can he miss this and not care? goddamn men.. I pity them for not having enough love for these little moments
I could never give it shape. Couldn’t figure out kids on the TV would give the fortress so many components, such staggering towers and keeps, complete with a moat and iron gate. It doesn’t help much that I can’t even name the many features that sandcastles imitate, but I’d watch my mounds of dirt lose form.
Granular foundations are no challenge to the wave: besieging, breaking, washing away all evidence of our monarchy in a tide of foam and froth. Shells are no shield, towers no refuge.
“Yeah. I’m gonna need you to take it down a notch for a couple of seconds okay because some of us aren’t minor deities of the sand colonies and you’re just going to have to respect that.”
Courfeyrac still hadn’t managed to use his pail to make a single sand tower. In the meantime, Grantaire had created, not a sandcastle, but a quaint, ornate, decently sized sandhouse in the middle of a sandtown which he’d been too lazy to actually build, but which he’d sketched into the sand with a piece of driftwood.
With a shrug, Grantaire moved to knock the sandhouse over, smudging over a bit of the sandtown as he walked toward it, but Courfeyrac leaped to his feet to stop his progress.
“No stOP I WAS KIDDING YOU LEAVE THAT THERE YOUR DISDAIN FOR BEAUTY IS APPALLING CONSIDERING YOUR TALENTS, GOOD GOD.”
Grantaire rolled his eyes, but he was still smiling, crooked and sun-sedated.
“You want some help?”
“No, I can –! Well, wait. Just — just teach me how to –”
Grantaire put a hand on Courfeyrac’s shoulder, steering him toward his several thwarted attempts at sandsculpture.
Wet sand, dribble castle by the sea, waves crashing and slowly disintegrating your hard work, grain by grain, as often as you build it up it sinks into the sea, slowly draining out and creating little holes and fissures in your architecture where the crabs can crawl through.
Javi sometimes felt like his relationship with his partner, Detective Ryan, was as precarious as a sandcastle. There was just no telling–in Javier’s mind, anyway–just when that final grain of sand, that final straw, would shift and their entire friendship would come tumbling down…
On Lake Huron, I have built sandcastles over days. No tide comes to rip them from the beach in my sleep, so I return and build magnificent walls and dangerous-looking moats, perfect for baby crocodiles.
And when I return, months later, the rains have washed things out to the water, and golden retrievers have left paw prints in the sand I stood on.
bellowing against the sand,
the sea grumbles at the gates.
our moat will not hold any more.
today will be a dark day.
The sandcastle will not be remembered,
the day will not be remembered.
The ocean always forgets.
A foot slammed down into the sandcastle, sending the carefully crafted turrets crashing back into formless sand. Carefully laid shells were sent flying too as raucous laughter fell from the boys mouth and tainted the air.
A woman I approached on a beach once had this great sandcastle
It was marvelous with tunnels underneath and walls and a gate
I sat down with this stranger asking her how she did it
She said in a very fresh tone “Youtube!”
They were building sandcastles all over the fortress down north. Sammy was getting more and more frustrated by each minute. His people were not abiding to his rules anymore, and he began to worry that he had lost his power as king of the Abbey Shore.
“Stop it you guys!” he stomped his feet as hard as he could, but all that his small feet could muster was a light thump that the tides washed up in a matter of seconds.
The children around him continued to build the sand castles, gaining speed and momentum, each castle looking grander and more intricate than the one before.
Writing a novel–like a sandcastle, built grain of sand by grain of sand, each grain of sand a piece of information, each piece of information put in the perfect order to be found by a reader at the precise moment it makes sense to be found, each precisely found grain like a key that clicks open locks retrospectively on all previously found grains, aha! after aha!, yes after yes, until the last unlocking becomes a bittersweet thing, to pull out the last grain like the pin on a grenade, and it must be fireworks, not sand in the face–one of the toughest jobs you’ll ever have.
sandcastle means childhood, sand grains reminiscent of a world of wearing away, sticking to our feet and our hands and rough and crackling in sandwiches prepared by anxious mothers. it’s sticky ocean hair and disappearing worlds.
As I lay on the beach watching the fair-haired young boy call his Dad over to look at his sandcastle, I listened to the splash of waves and screams of young children. ‘How lucky I am!’ I proclaimed.
I love the sandcastles that we built together. I wish we had taken more pictures. I miss your love, and the love that those sand castles represented.
“Sand castle is two words, not one,” snapped Olivia as she read her sister’s essay.
“Yeah, but my paper needs to be five hundred words maximum. If I make it two words, it’s five hundred one.”
Olivia sighed. “Is your beach story so important that you have to combine words together so you can include every detail?”
“Yes!” barked her sister. “You cannot tell me that my seeing two sea lions off the coast is not worth being in this essay!”
Building was the fun part. Discovering the perfect sand to water ratio for building. Constructing the turrets, digging the moat. The discovery that, though yards away from the sea, if you dug deeply enough, water would magically appear.
grains of sand blow through the air.
they catch in my hair.
oh, the days that were so simple,
yet are no more.
those sandcastle building days,
how i wish those were still my ways.
but somehow, as i got older, i lost it.
i lost that child, buried deep down within me.
buried deep beneath the sandcastles
strewn on the beach.
When he opened the bedroom door, he saw what he had imagined he would see when he heard them from the hallway. Coming home early to surprise his wife had not been a good idea after all. In one moment, his nine year marriage was washed away, crumbling like a sandcastle in a wave.
Fairytales are really popular. Even for people who are young at heart. Fairytales, they help us broaden our imagination. Especially prinecesses, kings, fairygodmothers, castles, princes. They make us believe in our dreams and make them come true.
Sandcastles, when you were at the beach, playing. Making a unique artwork, inspired by fairytales.
Little kids like to make sandcastles at the beach. Build motes around them to keep the waves from destroying their fragile masterpieces. I never had the patience to build a proper sandcastle. Squirming around in the sand was my idea of a day at the beach.
We walked along the shoreline, dodging sandcastles and their tiny architects as well as the salty spray from the waves. We didn’t speak, not for the longest time, and the sound of our footsteps, muted though they were by the hard-packed sand beneath our feet, seemed far too loud in the silence. The crash of the waves rolled like thunder in our ears and the light summer breeze whistled like a thousand arrows as it passed us.
I put my thoughts in a tiny box. I tucked them away, built walls around them, put a roof over them. Then the tide came and washed the walls and the roof and my thoughts away. And I could build a real castle, a real castle with you.
I sit in the dense, wet sand. The ocean barely brushes my feet with its chilly waves.
Sandcastle
build me up
on a hot summers day
when the sky is lit,
and the water sways.
a bucket or two
is all i require,
but use what you got,
and you’ll be inspired
———————————
I’ll retain my shape
if you pat my bones
It’s a tangled up mess
what i call home
She looked up from the tower, watching the dragon fly through the air and seeing her knights attempts to fend the beat off. ‘Why are you doing this?’ Amelia thought as she looked up at the once-gentle creature blowing fire over the kingdom. Getting up from her bed, she marched out of her bedroom doors – ignoring her guards’ objections – and found her way to the highest balcony in the castle. After calling upon her inner – “Amy? Amy I said it’s time to go! I know you’re having fun darling but it’s starting to get chilly.” Sighing, Amy took one last look at the marvelous sandcastle she had constructed and said goodbye to that particular realm of her imagination until another day, before turning back and taking her mom’s outstretched hand.
I see the children, listlessly playing in the sand, building their lop-sided sand castles. Castles that will stand tall(ish), be abandoned, then washed away with the salty tide.
When i was little i would always make sandcastles at the beach. they were always my favourite thing to do. and i actually kind of miss them, but i dont think its the sandcastles u actually miss. i think its my child hood that i actually miss. i miss all the drama free nature and the laughs and the tiny booboos on your skin. now life is full of drama, sometimes laughter but mostly crying. and its full of booboo on the inside not the outside and i think thats worse
It is time for sandcastles again. A seasonal event in San Diego, a place of no seasons. Crowds flock, the beaches completely blocked by endless streams of people, like ski slopes at the peak of winter.
I built a castle to represent our dreams, but it washed away with the sea. Just a few shells remain. I pocketed them to remind me of that day. That day at the sea.
Kick that sandcastle! And that sandcastle! Kick it until it bleeds! Kick the living “sand” out of it!
Now go back inside and think about what you did. Think about how isolated you feel?
No?
Then go kick some more castles! Kick them until your foot bleeds and you have to go to the doctor for a toenail infection. Now how does it feel?
I built sandcastles and made up sand people. I created a sand world. Then the ocean came, and washed everything else. The sand world was as fragile as my real world. Anything can come along and destroy everything.
the sandcastles! of course! the castles made of sand slip INTO the sea… eventually… jimi was RIGHT!! no way! sweet! jeeze!
sitting on the beach she watched the waves beat against the sand as the tide moved in. some children’s sandcastles were slowly being eroded, just like her life she felt.
The biggest thing you have ever seen
It’s grains seeping through your fingertips
You can call me Royal for this is my
Sandcastle.
When you are younger you play in the sand every time that your family goes to the beach. Your mother would put you in a tiny bathing suit that had polka dots on it. Your brother would kick the sand in your face. You would spend hours on just one tiny sand castle that you loved. Your mother would look at it and laugh. The beach was never much fun.
My kids… My kids in the sand.. she’s been making this sand castle for 30 minutes now and It still is nothing but when he knocks it over it’s like world war 3. How can he live without his babies? how can he miss this and not care? goddamn men.. I pity them for not having enough love for these little moments
I could never give it shape. Couldn’t figure out kids on the TV would give the fortress so many components, such staggering towers and keeps, complete with a moat and iron gate. It doesn’t help much that I can’t even name the many features that sandcastles imitate, but I’d watch my mounds of dirt lose form.
Granular foundations are no challenge to the wave: besieging, breaking, washing away all evidence of our monarchy in a tide of foam and froth. Shells are no shield, towers no refuge.
Sandcastle days. Today feels like a sandcastle day, a day to be spent making something out of nothing with your best friend, saying nothing.
I love to build sandcastles at the water’s edge and watch them disappear with the tide.
“Grantaire, you’re cheating.”
Grantaire smirked, but didn’t look up. “Oh yeah?”
“Yeah. I’m gonna need you to take it down a notch for a couple of seconds okay because some of us aren’t minor deities of the sand colonies and you’re just going to have to respect that.”
Courfeyrac still hadn’t managed to use his pail to make a single sand tower. In the meantime, Grantaire had created, not a sandcastle, but a quaint, ornate, decently sized sandhouse in the middle of a sandtown which he’d been too lazy to actually build, but which he’d sketched into the sand with a piece of driftwood.
With a shrug, Grantaire moved to knock the sandhouse over, smudging over a bit of the sandtown as he walked toward it, but Courfeyrac leaped to his feet to stop his progress.
“No stOP I WAS KIDDING YOU LEAVE THAT THERE YOUR DISDAIN FOR BEAUTY IS APPALLING CONSIDERING YOUR TALENTS, GOOD GOD.”
Grantaire rolled his eyes, but he was still smiling, crooked and sun-sedated.
“You want some help?”
“No, I can –! Well, wait. Just — just teach me how to –”
Grantaire put a hand on Courfeyrac’s shoulder, steering him toward his several thwarted attempts at sandsculpture.
“C’mon, it’s not as hard as it looks.”
Wet sand, dribble castle by the sea, waves crashing and slowly disintegrating your hard work, grain by grain, as often as you build it up it sinks into the sea, slowly draining out and creating little holes and fissures in your architecture where the crabs can crawl through.
Javi sometimes felt like his relationship with his partner, Detective Ryan, was as precarious as a sandcastle. There was just no telling–in Javier’s mind, anyway–just when that final grain of sand, that final straw, would shift and their entire friendship would come tumbling down…
On Lake Huron, I have built sandcastles over days. No tide comes to rip them from the beach in my sleep, so I return and build magnificent walls and dangerous-looking moats, perfect for baby crocodiles.
And when I return, months later, the rains have washed things out to the water, and golden retrievers have left paw prints in the sand I stood on.
chincoteague island as a young one
i grew fishing for crabs and capturing sea ponies by polaroid
now i grow, fishing for you- smitten.
bellowing against the sand,
the sea grumbles at the gates.
our moat will not hold any more.
today will be a dark day.
The sandcastle will not be remembered,
the day will not be remembered.
The ocean always forgets.
A foot slammed down into the sandcastle, sending the carefully crafted turrets crashing back into formless sand. Carefully laid shells were sent flying too as raucous laughter fell from the boys mouth and tainted the air.
I am like a sandcastle. Every little part of me counts towards something, but with one slight push or one little wave, I have become nothing.
A woman I approached on a beach once had this great sandcastle
It was marvelous with tunnels underneath and walls and a gate
I sat down with this stranger asking her how she did it
She said in a very fresh tone “Youtube!”
They were building sandcastles all over the fortress down north. Sammy was getting more and more frustrated by each minute. His people were not abiding to his rules anymore, and he began to worry that he had lost his power as king of the Abbey Shore.
“Stop it you guys!” he stomped his feet as hard as he could, but all that his small feet could muster was a light thump that the tides washed up in a matter of seconds.
The children around him continued to build the sand castles, gaining speed and momentum, each castle looking grander and more intricate than the one before.
Writing a novel–like a sandcastle, built grain of sand by grain of sand, each grain of sand a piece of information, each piece of information put in the perfect order to be found by a reader at the precise moment it makes sense to be found, each precisely found grain like a key that clicks open locks retrospectively on all previously found grains, aha! after aha!, yes after yes, until the last unlocking becomes a bittersweet thing, to pull out the last grain like the pin on a grenade, and it must be fireworks, not sand in the face–one of the toughest jobs you’ll ever have.
sandcastle means childhood, sand grains reminiscent of a world of wearing away, sticking to our feet and our hands and rough and crackling in sandwiches prepared by anxious mothers. it’s sticky ocean hair and disappearing worlds.
As I lay on the beach watching the fair-haired young boy call his Dad over to look at his sandcastle, I listened to the splash of waves and screams of young children. ‘How lucky I am!’ I proclaimed.