Salt Lesson

The tide pulls back its long confession, leaving only the rind of what it carried— kelp splayed open like a book nobody finished, stones licked smooth past any argument.

I used to think the sea was taking things. Now I watch it set them down with the care of someone placing glasses on a table after everyone has left.

There is a salt lesson in this: how what dissolves does not vanish but enters the body of something larger, becomes the sting in the wound, the preserving crystal, the taste.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on her kitchen sill. Each piece had been a bottle once, a purpose, a label someone chose. She said the ocean doesn't break things—it translates them.

Tonight the water pulls its hem across the sand again, again, and I am learning what she meant: that loss is only matter changing its address.