What the Salt Remembers

The tide comes in with its old insistence, dragging names across the sand the way grief drags its hem through a room you thought you'd left.

My grandmother's hands moved like water over dough, over hair, over the radio dial searching for a station only she could hear.

There is a kind of salt that stays in wood, long after the sea retreats — you taste it when the house breathes in summer heat.

I have stood at the edge of things I couldn't name, watching light break apart on the surface, each piece still holding the shape of the whole.

What remains is not what we meant to keep. The ocean forgets nothing — that is why it keeps returning, still trying to say it.