What the Salt Knows

The tide does not remember the shore it has swallowed— only the pulling away, the long return, the cold rehearsal of loss.

My grandmother's hands were always reaching for something just out of frame: a jar lid, a name, the edge of a word that had gone somewhere without her.

Salt teaches nothing it hasn't already learned from the wound. It enters quietly, the way grief does, filling the shape of what isn't there.

I used to think the sea was patient. Now I know it is simply old, and keeps moving because stillness is the one thing it cannot survive.