What the Salt Remembers

The sea does not forget a shore. It keeps returning with the same insistence, smoothing stones into the shapes of its arriving, teaching the cliff face what it means to yield.

My grandmother's hands smelled of brine and flour, a language I never learned to speak back to her. Now I stand at the edge of any water and feel the syllables rise, unfinished.

There are things the body holds the way a harbor holds the cold — not tightly, but completely, every inch of surface touched.

I do not know what she wanted from the future. Only that she pressed her thumb into my palm once the way a seal presses into wax, to say: something of this should remain.

The tide goes out the same way grief does — not gone, but gathered somewhere further off, still carrying its weight of salt, still moving toward the places it has been.