What the Salt Remembers

The tide comes back the way old grief does— not breaking, but arriving, spreading flat across the sand as if it had never left.

The stones here have been rounded by argument with water, each edge surrendered slowly, each year a little more the shape of yielding.

A woman stands where the waves thin out, her feet in the cold wrinkle of the sea. She is thinking of something she cannot name, which is the ocean's oldest trick— to make us feel what has no language.

Somewhere below the light the salt holds everything it has touched: the ships, the nets, the hands that pulled them, the names called out across the dark that no one answered.

By evening the beach is empty. The water goes on practicing its one refrain against the shore, patient as forgetting, faithful as return.