Salt Autobiography

The sea remembers nothing and everything at once— each wave a sentence started, never quite finished, rolling back into its own blue mouth.

I found a jar of salt my grandmother kept on the highest shelf, behind the flour, labeled in a hand I barely recognized. It tasted like the summer she carried me into water deeper than my name.

There is a particular grief in dissolving. How the crystal surrenders its architecture to become the broth, the tear, the road in winter none of us can see.

All my sharpest memories have this quality of brine— they sting the places I forgot were open, they preserve what should have spoiled by now.

Tonight the wind is mineral and close. I set the table with what I have left: a glass, a loaf, a small white hill that holds the ocean in its lattice, waiting to be touched, to come undone.