What the Salt Remembers

The tide comes back the way grief does— not asking, not explaining, just the cold pull at the ankles again.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the sill above the sink. She said the ocean was polishing its apologies.

I have stood at that same water's edge and understood how a thing can be worn smooth by what it cannot stop returning to— how sorrow makes its edges tender before it makes them gone.

The salt knows this. It has always known. It stayed when everything else evaporated, a white residue on the skin, the body's own record of what it held.