Hippocampus

The textbook mentions it in passing: named by anatomists for the seahorse. Meaning someone elbow-deep in the solemn fact of a person paused, and thought about the sea. So now I can't unknow it—that in each of us, one to a temporal lobe, a small horse of the ocean floats in the dark, keeping the smell of rain, the route home, your grandmother's telephone voice. Real seahorses anchor by the tail to whatever holds still, and wait for the current to bring what it brings. Which is memory, more or less. I used to think the brain was gray weather. Now I know it keeps livestock: two of them, curled and patient, holding on to the eelgrass while everything we ever loved drifts by in reach.