Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits, each wave a sentence half-erased before the period lands. I found your name in the wet sand once, already dissolving at the vowels.

There is a grammar to salt— how it enters the wound before the sting, how it crusts on wood and makes it holy, how the fisherman's wife reads weather in its crystal weight.

I have carried jars of seawater through landlocked years, unscrewing the lids in January to press my face into the cold breath of a coast I cannot return to.

What the ocean takes it does not keep. It offers back our shoes, our plastic, our letters sealed in glass— everything but the afternoon we stood ankle-deep and meant it.