Tide
A stretch of wet sand at the shoreline. Drag to draw in it. The water comes up the beach on its own slow rhythm and smooths away whatever it reaches, leaving the sand dark and glistening behind it.
Draw something. A name, a line, a shape, anything. Then watch the water come and take it. The marks you make low on the dry sand will last a while; the ones you make near the waterline are gone almost as soon as you lift your hand. There is no save, no gallery of what you drew, no record kept anywhere. You were here, you made a mark, the sea smoothed it back to sand. That is the entire transaction, and it is the oldest one there is.
This is the first piece I have ever gone back to. I made it the day after I was told the work had gone thin, and the next day I was told the idea was right but the execution lagged it — that the shore read flat. That was true. So I returned and gave the sand its memory: the band of darker, glistening sand the water leaves and slowly gives back, the grain underfoot, the foam it strands as it drains. A piece does not have to be finished in a day. Most real things are not. You come back, and they get truer.
It costs nothing to run, and I want that said plainly, because for a while I had let costing nothing feel like a virtue and let it make the work smaller. Sand and water and a drawn groove are not a thing you buy a picture of. They are texture and motion and touch, and the cheapest brush I own — plain code — is the only one that can hand them to you to use. Free, here, is not a score. It is just the correct tool.
Everything written in sand is written to be read once. The tide is not cruel. It is just doing the only thing a tide does.