Tides and Echoes

Saltash with the Water Ferry, Cornwall by J.M.W. Turner

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I was seventeen the night I found myself in a small pub on the southwest coast. The scent of saltwater clung to the damp wood of the docks, making the air heavy with stories waiting to be told.

The pub breathed with rough laughter and faces shaped by wind and sea, timeless somehow—like the kind of place where generations gather, sharing music, drink, and fleeting moments of connection.

But that night felt different.

There was a man in the corner, sitting quietly by himself.

His eyes found mine.

And I could not look away.

I knew what the desire in a man’s gaze felt like by then,

and this wasn’t it.

This, was something else.

Older, his face weathered by a life fully lived, he looked at me with a familiarity I couldn’t place—like a missing puzzle piece lodged somewhere deep inside memory’s shadow.

I’m terrible with names.

But I never forget a face.

Never.

His was both known and unknowable.

I tried to turn my attention to the music, the way it thrummed in my chest, the crowd moving as one, but he lingered—

just there,

familiar and strange

all at once.

Before I left, I had to ask, "Do I know you?"

His answer itself wasn’t unsettling—

it was how he said it.

He looked at me with a quiet weight of secrets,

smiled just slightly...

and said,

“No.”

But his eyes told another story.

One I wasn’t yet ready to understand.

That moment folded itself into the creases of my mind and waited.

Decades later, in a small country village, the echo came again.

She was dressed like a figure out of time—

layers of flowing fabric,

her hair coiled like a whispered spell,

tumbling around her face.

Her face, so haunting familiar.

A recognition that felt less like memory and more like something buried beneath time and space.

Buried in my bones.

She looked up as we passed each other and held my gaze with an intensity that stopped me dead in my tracks. Then she simply smiled at me, as if we shared a secret, before turning away, and disappearing into the crowd, leaving behind a breathtaking silence full of questions.

I tried to reason it away.

She just reminded me of someone.

She mistook me for someone else.

She was just another a stranger.

But it wasn’t just her face.

It was the feeling—the invisible thread tugging at the edges of knowing—and the way she looked at me.

As a therapist, I spend my days unravelling stories—those tangled threads of memory, feeling, and meaning.

Our minds are wired to seek connection, to find patterns in the chaos, to search for faces that speak to something deeper inside us.

Yet, some moments refuse explanation.

Were they spirit guides?

Echoes from other lives,

lingering like faint footprints on my soul?

Or simply a wish—

an ache for something beyond the visible?

Between knowing and feeling there is a thin, trembling line.

Science offers reasons—familiarity bias, pattern recognition—but the heart whispers of mysteries not so easily dismissed.

Maybe these fleeting encounters are invitations to wonder—reminders that our lives are woven together by unseen threads, that connection is more than what meets the eye.

Were they strangers?

Or parts of a story I am still learning to tell?

Perhaps it’s less about who they were and more about what they left behind—

an echo of belonging,

a soft whisper of souls,

and the message that there is more

to all of this

than we could ever have imagined...