Salt Memoir

The tide keeps no record of what it takes— a sandal, a name drawn with a stick, the hollow a sleeping body pressed into the morning's unmarked shore.

I have been that shore. I have held the shape of someone's passing long enough to believe it was mine, then watched the water come back speaking in tongues of foam and grit.

There is a salt in memory that preserves nothing whole. A voice returns without its words, a kitchen without its smell of bread, a hand that reaches from no arm.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass, each piece a letter the ocean had been grinding into silence for decades. She said they were almost finished becoming sand again.

I think of her when the tide withdraws and leaves its bright, temporary maps— how she would kneel to read them, how she never once tried to stay the water.