There are two photographs of the same rocks.

In one, I am standing on the jetty in soft gray light, barefoot, smiling. In the other, taken on a different morning, the heron stands on those same rocks, dark against a sky gone gold and burning. Same ground. Different sky. I don’t get to choose which morning I’m given, the gentle one or the fierce one. I only get to choose whether I show up to the rocks.

This was a week of showing up. It was also a week of firsts and the kind I’ve come to know by heart this season, simply working through every first after what I hadn’t known would be lasts.

We read 1 Corinthians 15 in my small group last week — the chapter where Paul asks, O death, where is your victory? O death, where is your sting? I keep thinking about how much of this season has felt like a series of small burials. Packing things away. Throwing things out. Standing in rooms that used to hold a future I’d assumed. Somehow, the whole promise of that chapter is that what looks like an ending is the very place something rises, that what’s sown in the ground is not what comes up out of it.

I made the bedroom mine. I moved my own dresser back in, strung the lights the way I’d always meant to, put down a new rug and hung currents in colors I picked. I went through the boxes. The hardest one held Christmas… our matching hats, the ornaments I’d packed away so recently, certain we’d pull them out again next year, like usual. I sat on the floor and separated what was ours into what was mine and what was his. It was sobering. It was hard. I keep finding out smallest things quietly holding a future I’d assumed.

On Monday, I didn’t think I could make new memories. A friend decided otherwise.

Angel showed up almost without warning because she knew I hadn’t cooked in nearly four months and she knew I used to love it. I made a quick trip to the grocery store for the essentials. Angel brought hot dogs, her family and a friend, and her boyfriend to man the grill; she set about filling my kitchen with people on purpose. I set about the salad bar.

I reached for the knife I always use for romaine. It wasn’t there. It was packed. It was his. So, I reached for my own knife instead, the one I had before him, and I cut the lettuce with that. When I got to the onion, my hand went for a second cutting board out of habit because he never let me cut onions on the same board as everything else. I stopped. I used one board. Just one.

Someone asked a question about one of my recipes; I got out the family book, and it hurt to turn the pages. Even meals are memories, and some meals are a dozen of them. I didn’t want to cook. I didn’t want to fix the salad. I did it anyway. I got through it. I even threw away the anniversary cake we never ate, the one I’d hated to keep and hated more to throw out. I have hated throwing all of it away.

I’d set up the new patio furniture on the front porch, and Angel and I chatted there waiting for the burgers to finish. I put on Jack Johnson, and some of us sat under the gazebo in the backyard while it rained. People hugged me, and I let them, though I keep the hugs short now because I come apart if they last too long. They weren’t all believers, but when we stood in that kitchen, I asked if I could pray over the meal. They let me, and I surprised myself that words came. Still, that kitchen has always been a place where we bow our heads before we eat, and I needed to thank God for filling it with joy I could actually feel. I tried to live. I think I did.

This morning at dawn, I could still taste the memory of last night, of sweet friends and laughter, of facing triggers and the firsts after the lasts. Anchored with my toes in the sand with the gnats nipping at my cheeks, I knew something under my skin I couldn’t articulate until now.

It was never the sunrise itself I was fighting for. It was the grounding — the tethering of myself, every morning, to the Author of the sunrise and of me. Those rocks hold the heron. They hold me. They hold us for the same reason: the rock beneath us doesn’t move. He alone is my rock and my salvation, my fortress; I will not be shaken.

When I can barely stand, I go to the pier at dawn. God resets His grace, and I can stand and even smile, not because I feel strong or joyful, but because that is what He does at first light. He steadies what’s shaking. He gives me a smile in spite of my circumstances because He is the thing in control when nothing else is. In clouds and rain and clear skies, grayscale or golden hues.

The knife I brought into this house outlasted the one I didn’t. The gathering outlasted the marriage. The prayer outlasted the people missing from the table. None of it was ever his to take because none of it was ever really about him.

I’ve spent these months tethered to a man I’m always aware of… aware of where he is, aware that he is not free, aware that I am. Nevertheless, that is not the tether that holds me. The rocks were never about the water or the view or who sat beside me the first time I ever beheld the wonder of a sunrise at Yorktown Pier.

The rocks were always the Rock.

That’s where I’ll tether myself. Not to anything that can be packed in a box or moved out of a room or held in a cell, but to the One who meets me at dawn and makes me stand.

I keep thinking I’m burying things this season. The hats, the cake, the future I’d assumed. However, Paul said what you put in the ground is never what comes back up. You sow one thing and something else entirely rises. I don’t know yet what’s rising. I just know God keeps calling me to the waterfront before dawn, and I’ll keep going to find out.