Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits— each wave a line item of surrender, shells tallied and scattered, the foam signing off in cursive before the sand drinks it whole.

I found a journal once, swollen with brine, its pages fused into a single pale tongue. Whatever was written there had become the water's business.

Some mornings the sea returns things: a plank worn smooth as a vowel, kelp in cursive heaps, the hollow architecture of a crab still holding the shape of its argument.

I think memory works this way— not storage but erosion, the important things made lighter until they float just beneath the surface, nudged shoreward by every passing swell.