What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not return the same water. You know this the way you know the name of something before it was yours.

At the shoreline, a child learns that the sea is always leaving, that arrival and departure share one motion, one long breath pulled through stone.

My grandmother kept a jar of Atlantic sand on the windowsill where the light came last. I never asked her why. Some things are held in the holding.

The salt stays in the wood long after the flood. The body holds the shape of what it feared. What we call forgetting is only the water finding a new way to the sea.

Now the jar is mine. The sand has no country, no particular shore. Only the weight of it tells me something was carried here. Something chose to stay.