What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back like someone leaving a room quietly, so as not to wake you. It takes the smooth stones, the broken ones, everything it touched that morning.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the sill— green, white, the rare blue— and would hold each piece to the light the way you hold a word you've almost forgotten.

The ocean does not grieve what it loses. It only comes back in its own time, its own language, laying down new things at the threshold.

I am learning to do the same: to let the water go dark, to trust that what was carried out has not ceased to exist— only changed shore.