What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not return what it has taken. It only offers back the shape of absence— a cavity in sand, a smoothed-over hollow where a name once pressed itself.

The cliffs know this. They lean into the wind with a patience older than patience, surrendering inch by inch what took ten thousand years to make.

A mussel shell half-buried in the wrack. The hinge still hinges. The tongue still remembers how it once closed against the world and held the sea inside.

I stood where the water kept arriving and asked it what it carried. It said: nothing you would recognize. It said: everything you have already lost.