The day doesn’t end so much as loosen its grip. Light thins, evaporates. Whatever colour is left of the day spreads across the water like a final attempt at coherence. Second Beach, and really Stanley Park as a whole, always feels slightly removed from the rest of the city, as if the park is unwilling to acknowledge the density encroaching just beyond the treeline. What draws me here isn’t the idyllic postcard view but the moment right before the view dissolves. The beach becomes a record of disappearances, of footprints overwritten by the tide, the driftwood half-claimed by the water, shadows lengthening until they wane into nightfall. Watching the sun slip under the horizon feels like the final pull of the tide, an ending that never stays gone for long.