What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not return the same water twice. Still, the sand holds the shape of it— that particular weight, that cold arrival.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the sill where the morning came in sideways. She said the ocean grinds down everything beautiful into something you can hold without bleeding.

I used to think grief worked the same way, that time was an abrasive, patient and anonymous. But some mornings I find her handwriting in the margin of a book I never saw her read.

The glass in the jar is still green, still blue. It does not know it was once a bottle, does not mourn the shape of what it held. I am trying to learn that.

Out past the breakers, the kelp lifts and falls with a breathing that has nothing to do with lungs. The salt goes on being salt. The light keeps finding the water anyway.