What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not mourn what it takes. It carries your shoes past the breakwater, past the rusted buoy nobody names anymore, out to where the light stops being a color.

I have stood on this shore before— not this shore, but one equally cold, with the same flat stones that hold warmth a few minutes longer than they should.

Grief works like salt: invisible once dissolved, but present in everything that follows— the bread, the wound, the preserved thing you find years later, still sweet.

By evening the water goes bronze and small. The boats come home by memory, the pilots looking not at the horizon but at the hands that know the way.

What remains is not the lost thing. What remains is the shape the lost thing made in you, like a key impression in wax— cool now, exact, and permanent.