What the Salt Remembers

The tide erases its own name across the sand each morning, yet returns to the same shore as if forgetting were a kind of faith.

A child holds a mussel shell to her ear and hears the roar of distances— not the sea itself, she will learn later, but the shape of listening.

My grandmother kept salt in a small blue dish beside the stove, her fingers dipping in the way a priest touches water at the door, reflexive, holy, not quite thought.

Some things teach themselves to us through repetition, the way erosion is really just the ocean practicing patience until the cliff finally agrees.

What is carried dissolves. What dissolves was always water. The salt stays.