Salt Library

The tide has been collecting manuscripts for longer than we've had the word for loss. Each wave a page turned back upon itself, the foam a margin note no one will read.

I found a jar of sea glass on a shelf in my grandmother's kitchen after she was gone — green and white and one piece almost blue, tumbled until every sharp thing had been loved out of them.

That is what the ocean does with grief. It does not solve or answer. It holds the broken thing and turns it over and over in its salt library until the edges learn to fit the hand.

Some nights I walk the shore at low tide where the water leaves its archives bare — shell fragments, plastic, bone, all the same weight now, all granted the same careful erasure.

I take nothing home. I leave nothing behind. The waves will shelve what I was among the rest of it, eventually, and what I carried will go smooth.