What the Tide Carries Back

The sea does not apologize for what it takes— the shoe, the letter, the name you called out once into a storm that had no ears.

Some mornings the water returns what it borrowed: a bottle's green shoulder, a plank smoothed to the grain of water, the idea of something that was yours.

You stand at the lip of it learning the grammar of tides— how every going-out is also a coming-back, how the shore only appears to hold still.

The salt in your throat is not grief, or not only. It is the ocean teaching you that dissolution is another word for belonging.