Salt Lessons

The tide keeps its own ledger, deposits and withdrawals scratched into the wet sand like a language only the departing wave can read.

I stood at the edge of something once, not a cliff but a kitchen, watching my grandmother press salt into the skin of a fish as if teaching it to remember the sea.

She said the trick is knowing how much absence a thing can hold before it becomes something else— the way a bay empties at low tide and fills with light instead of water.

Now I find salt everywhere: in the white crust on old leather, in the sting behind closed eyes, in the rim of a glass someone left out all night for the rain.

What the ocean gave us we carry without asking— this mineral habit of return, this need to taste the world before we believe it is real.