What the Salt Remembers

The tide brings back everything it once took — a shoe, a name, the white noise of someone breathing beside you in the dark.

We called it the sea's forgetting but it was only storage, the long blue warehouse of what we could not keep ourselves.

My grandmother's hands smelled of brine long after she left the coast, as if the water had signed her and would not be unsigned.

Some things dissolve and some things crystallize — grief is like that, spending years in solution before it finally appears as form.

I have walked the shore at low tide looking for what the salt remembers. It gives back stones, smoothed past recognition. It gives back light, which was never ours to lose.