What the Salt Remembers

The tide has been practicing forgetting for longer than we have had names for water. It drags its hem across the sand, leaving the old shapes half-erased, half-born.

My grandmother kept a jar of seawater on the sill above the kitchen sink. She never told us where it came from. After she died, no one could bring themselves to pour it out.

There is a grief that does not pool or spill but crystallizes slowly on the glass — a white residue the light makes luminous at certain angles, which is to say: at unexpected hours.

The ocean does not mourn the shore it spent the night reshaping. It is already somewhere else, already becoming the sound another sleepless person hears.