What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not come back for you. It arrives the way sleep arrives — without knowing what it left behind.

My grandmother kept a jar of sand from a beach she would never name. On certain mornings she would hold it to the light and tilt it slowly, watching nothing move.

I think grief works like sediment: not gone, only rearranged, settling into the new shape of the floor. The water above it looks clear.

She is gone now, the jar still on the sill. When I shake it the sand rises like smoke and the light catches it the way she always hoped something would catch her — briefly, before the settling.