What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not apologize for what it carries back— a child's shoe, a rusted hinge, the smell of someone else's kitchen fire.

We stood at the estuary for hours watching the brown water thin into something almost translucent. You said nothing is lost, only rearranged. I believed you the way you believe in rain before it comes.

Later, in a house full of your things, I learned that salt preserves. The olives in the jar, the letters in the drawer— everything waiting to be tasted again by hands that no longer know the recipe.

Now the tide turns as tides do, indifferent, meticulous. It smooths the sand over what was here. Not erasure—more like the way a held breath finally, quietly, releases.