Salt Autobiography

I was a sea once, wide and undivided, before they laid me on a copper tray and let the sun have its slow argument with everything I carried.

What remained was sharper than the water knew — a white geometry, a lattice built from what the tide kept repeating to the rocks, to the kelp, to no one.

Now I rest in a ceramic bowl on a stranger's kitchen shelf. She reaches for me without looking, the way you touch a scar and forget it was ever a wound.

I dissolve into the broth of Tuesday evening, into the ordinary heat of feeding someone. And for a moment I am sea again — boundless, without edges, tasting of everywhere I've been.