What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back across flat sand, leaving its thin film of white— what the ocean could not keep, it deposits here like a name written without hands.

I have stood at the edge of myself the way water stands at land's end, not knowing whether to dissolve or stay and be shaped into something smaller.

My grandmother kept a jar of salt from a sea she would never visit again. On certain nights she held it to the lamp. The crystals caught the light and gave it back differently.

There is a kind of grief that does not announce itself— it settles, slow and mineral, into the soft tissue of the ordinary: a kitchen, a jar, a Thursday evening.

What we carry is rarely the thing itself but its residue, its outline, the shape the water left when it went somewhere else and forgot to take us with it.