Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in drift lines— broken shells, a knot of kelp, the hollowed architecture of a crab still wearing its last season.

I read it kneeling, the way the devout read, tracing each entry with a finger that comes away tasting of brine and something older than brine.

There was a summer I pressed sea glass into the margin of a letter, believing the green shard carried the whole Atlantic in its curve.

It didn't, of course. But the salt stayed in the paper for years, and when I unfolded it again the room filled with distance—

that particular distance the ocean holds between what it takes and what it decides, for no reason, to give back.