What the Salt Remembers

The tide comes in like a confession, spreading itself thin across the flats, leaving behind the white residue of arrival — each grain a record of where the water was.

The cliffs have learned to read this. They give themselves over slowly, a shoulder at a time, until the sea holds more of them than the land does.

My grandmother kept a jar of salt from a beach I have never visited. She said: taste it when you forget what grief feels like. Not as punishment — as proof.

Somewhere a wave is building that has not yet found the thing it will dissolve. It carries its urgency through fathoms, unaware of its own patience, practicing the shape of the coast in advance.

We are always arriving somewhere that has already been worn into readiness for us. The salt does not mourn the stone. It simply remembers, precisely, the form of what it unmade.