What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back like a held breath and leaves behind its writing— dark cursive pressed into wet sand, letters that mean nothing we haven't already lost.

My grandmother kept a jar of ocean on the windowsill above the sink. By August it had gone to white crust, the water long evaporated, only the mineral fact of it remaining.

She said the sea forgets nothing. That brine is just old weeping preserved by time and repetition, the world's long practice of letting go and circling back.

I walk the line where wet meets dry and feel the ground shift under me— not unstable, but breathing, the way a chest rises with something it cannot say.