What the Salt Knows

The tide arrives without ceremony, dragging its gray tongue across the stones that have been learning patience since before there were words for waiting.

A gull hangs still in the updraft, suspended like a thought that hasn't decided yet which way to fall. Below, the kelp writes cursive in the shallows.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea-glass on the sill— green, white, a single piece the color of old bruise. She never told me where she found them, only that the ocean gives back everything it has finished softening.

By evening the light goes copper on the water and the shore smells of its own ancient salt, of what has evaporated and returned, of loss that cycles back as weather.

I leave without taking anything. The stones keep their silence. The gull tips one wing and is gone.