What the Salt Knows

The tide pulls back like a hand withdrawing from a table mid-sentence, leaving the sand glittered and spent, holding the shape of what was here.

Salt crusts the stone where the wave slept. I press my thumb into it, feel the grain dissolve against my skin— old water returning to the body.

Every shore is a record of forgetting: the storm that came in autumn, the boat dragged past its depth, the name called out and swallowed whole.

Nothing the sea takes is truly lost. It only moves into the general dark, translated to pressure, to cold current, to the slow dreaming of fish.

I stand at the edge a long time. The horizon offers nothing but more horizon, pale and ongoing, the world's patience made visible.