What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not ask permission. It arrives the way grief does — with the smell of somewhere older, dragging its hem of foam across the stones.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the sill where light fell longest. Blue, she said, is the hardest to find. Blue means it survived being broken long enough to become beautiful.

I have stood at the edge of the water and felt the pull not outward but downward, that patient gravity beneath the surface that knows your name better than you do.

Every shore is a scar the ocean keeps reopening. Every return an apology dressed in the body of a wave. The salt remembers what the sand forgets.