What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not come back the same. What it carries out — a sandal, a word spoken at the wrong moment — it keeps, trading it for something colder, unnamed.

My grandmother's hands smelled of the sea before she ever stood beside it. Some griefs arrive already ancient, salted in the blood before the wound.

I have watched the water fold itself over and over the same stones, and thought: this is what patience looks like when it has given up on change.

There is a name for the line where wet sand becomes dry — where the ocean almost stayed. I have lived there longer than I meant to, neither given back nor fully taken.

The gull crosses the horizon and is gone. The horizon remains, indifferent and precise, cutting the sky from what the sky reflects: two blues that never quite agree.