What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not forget what it has touched — every stone it carried and set down again along some other coast.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the windowsill above the sink, each piece its own opacity, ground to softness by what would not let it go. She called it the ocean's apology.

I think of all the things that have to be broken before they can be held — how salt enters a wound not to hurt but to preserve.

The jar is mine now. I fill it with water sometimes, watch the glass shift and settle into shapes it never chose, and still: luminous.