Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in foam and gravel, each entry erased before the ink sets. I have watched it revise the same sentence all afternoon — the one about staying, the one it never finishes.

Driftwood arrives with its passport of barnacles, stamped by harbors I will never visit. I hold it the way you hold a letter from someone who has moved and left no forwarding address.

There is a grammar to loneliness the sea understands — the long dependent clause of a wave that reaches, pauses, and withdraws without completing its thought, leaving only a margin of wet sand.

Tonight the salt will crystallize on my collar and I will carry the ocean home in the weave of my jacket, a small, dissolving archive of everything the water tried to say.