The Salt on My Skin

the salt on my skin

i come back to this town like a ghost haunting the edges of my own life the train station still smells of diesel and damp the same benches worn smooth by generations of waiting and i am just another weary traveler carrying too many bags too many years the weight of all the things i thought i’d left behind

i walk the familiar streets past the diner where i spilled my first secrets to a boy with eyes like the sea after a storm past the library where i lost myself in other people’s words until i found my own past the hospital where my mother worked her gentle hands healing the world one broken body at a time

the salt air hits me as i reach the shore that familiar tang on my tongue the taste of childhood summers of endless days and firefly nights of my mother’s voice calling me in for dinner as the sun bled into the waves

i take off my shoes and feel the sand cool and gritty between my toes the same sand that once held the footprints of a girl with dreams too big for this small town a girl who swore she’d never come back and yet here i am a woman with salt in her hair and the ocean’s rhythm in her bones

i walk along the water’s edge letting the waves lick at my feet the tide is going out leaving behind a litter of shells and seaweed and broken bits of things that once were whole i think of my mother how she would walk this beach for hours collecting smooth stones and sea glass treasures she’d bring home and set on the windowsill to catch the light

she’s been gone for years now but i still see her everywhere in the curve of a shell in the cry of a gull in the way the light falls on the water just before sunset she is the salt on my skin the sting in my eyes the ache in my chest that never quite goes away

i remember a day like this when i was twenty and certain i knew everything there was to know i stood on this shore and shouted my defiance to the wind and the waves and anyone who would listen i was going to be somebody i was going to leave this town in my dust and never look back

my mother stood beside me her nurse’s hands rough from years of caring she didn’t try to stop me didn’t tell me i was making a mistake she just looked at me with those eyes that saw right through to the heart of me and said “the world is big and wide, vivian and there’s so much you need to see but this place will always be a part of you no matter how far you run”

i didn’t believe her then i thought i could outrun my past outrun the girl i used to be but now i know you can’t escape the salt in your blood the pull of the tide in your veins this town is a part of me like the lines on my face like the silver in my hair like the memories that haunt me even in my dreams

i keep walking past the old lighthouse its once-bright beam now dimmed by time past the rocky point where i used to sit for hours writing bad poetry and dreaming of escape past the cove where i first learned to swim my mother’s hands holding me up until i found my own buoyancy

the seasons have changed since then winter has come and gone leaving its mark on the land and on me but the ocean remains constant and changing all at once a mirror to the tides within me the ebb and flow of memory and loss of all the things i’ve loved and left behind

i think of all the versions of myself that have walked this shore the child chasing waves the girl dreaming of elsewhere the woman returning each one a ghost haunting the others each one a part of the whole that is me

the light is fading now the sky a watercolor wash of pink and gold the air grows colder the salt bite sharper i pull my coat tighter around me but i don’t turn back not yet there’s something i need to find here something i lost long ago among the shells and the sea glass among the memories that shift like sand beneath my feet

i keep walking until the town is just a smudge of light behind me until the only sound is the wind and the waves and the beating of my own heart and i stand at the edge of the world where the ocean meets the sky and i let the salt wind whip through me cleansing me stripping me bare until i am nothing but bone and breath and memory

and i wonder as the last light fades and the stars begin to prick through the velvet dark what is this pull this tide that draws me back to the place that made me even as it breaks me apart again and again memory loss the salt on my skin and the sea in my blood calling me home to the ghosts of all my former selves and the woman i am becoming still after all these years just a girl standing on the shore listening for the echo of her mother’s voice in the crash of the waves and the cry of the gulls and the endless endless sigh of the sea