Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can enter, its shelves rearranged each hour— volumes of kelp pressed flat between waves, the cursive of foam on dark sand already dissolving as it's written.

I found a conch there once, held it the way you hold a bowl of something warm, and listened to its single argument: that distance is just sound wearing a different body.

Somewhere a lighthouse counts the dark in long, slow breaths of light. The rocks remember every hull that kissed them wrong, but they have forgiven the water.

What the salt preserves is not the thing itself but the shape of its leaving— a fish skeleton fine as lace, a rope frayed to a whisper, the hull's ghost printed on the pier.

I am learning this grammar of return: how the sea gives back what it has changed beyond recognition and calls it a gift, and means it.