What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not ask permission. It arrives in the dark like an old debt, dragging its cold hem across the threshold of whatever we thought was ours.

My grandmother's hands smelled of salt long after she left the sea behind — as if the body keeps its first lessons the way limestone keeps the shape of shells.

I have stood at the edge of the water and understood nothing except the sound of it, how it rewrites the same sentence over and over against the rocks until the meaning changes.

What we lose does not go out like a light. It changes state — becomes the smell of low tide, the ache before rain, the way a room feels after someone leaves it.

The ocean knows this. It holds everything that ever entered it and gives nothing back the same.