What the Salt Remembers

The tide does not apologize for what it carries back — a child's sandal, a fish vertebra, the green bottle someone filled with silence and threw.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the sill above the sink. She said the ocean rounds things so they won't cut anyone else. I never asked what she meant.

Now I am far from water and I still taste it — mineral, ancient, the weight of things that dissolved to become part of something larger than the shape they once held.

There is a kind of forgetting that is only transformation. The salt stays. The jar stays. The light through colored glass stays.