What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not return the same water twice, yet the shore keeps the shape of every wave — a palimpsest of pressures, each stone smoothed by what has already left.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea salt on the sill above the sink. She never said where it came from. When the light came through it in the afternoon I thought I could see the Atlantic moving inside.

There are things we hold without knowing we are holding them — the specific weight of a hand on a shoulder, the sound a door makes when someone is trying not to wake you.

Everything dissolves and is carried. The salt in the blood once was a sea. The sea once was a sky of scattered hydrogen, cooling into itself, learning the long patience of water.

Whatever I am forgetting now is being forgotten into something else — the way the jar on the sill was not holding the ocean back but keeping it close.