What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back like a held breath, leaving the sand dark and candid, everything the water touched briefly luminous, briefly known.

A child ran here once with a bucket, filling it not with water but with the idea of water— the weight of wanting to carry something home.

The gulls do not mourn what the wave erases. They read the shore the way we read old letters, looking for the name that still belongs to us, finding instead a stranger's careful hand.

Salt dries to a white rind on the rocks. The sea does not forget— it only redistributes what it loves, gives it back changed, gives it back farther out.

I stood here in another year with you. The light fell the same way it falls now, sideways and generous, as if it had nowhere else to be.