Salt Lessons

The tide pool holds its lecture still— anemones flexing open like questions no one thought to ask, hermit crabs trading houses as though the whole sea were a market of leaving.

I learned my first word for longing at the edge of a rock shelf, where the water pulled back its silk and showed me what it had been hiding: the ordinary bones of the earth.

My grandmother said salt preserves but also erodes. She meant the way we carry people— their weight a flavor on the tongue, sharp, then necessary, then gone.

Now I stand where the breakers fold themselves into white linen and spread across the sand like an offering. Everything the ocean returns is lighter than what it took.