Salt Flats at Low Tide

The sky comes down to meet itself here, where brine has pulled back like a held breath and left behind its white arithmetic— crystal after crystal, the earth's slow spelling.

You walk until the horizon stops being a line and becomes a threshold you are always approaching, your shadow stretched into someone thinner, more patient, unburdened of its name.

The heat does not press down but rises from the ground like an old exhalation, and the silence is the kind that has a texture, that you could press your palm into and feel.

Nothing rusts here. Nothing softens. Even memory, arriving like a migratory bird, lands briefly and does not stay— the flatness offers no purchase for grief.

At dusk the salt turns pink, then briefly violet, as if apologizing for the severity of noon. You carry a fistful of crystals home that dissolve by morning into nothing.