Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounting — each wave a sentence started and swallowed back before the verb.

I found a notebook on the jetty once, its pages bloated past the spine, every word returned to pulp except a phone number in pencil that no one will ever call.

The ocean does not grieve for this. It files the salt away in granite, tucks shells into the ledger of the sand, and balances its books by morning.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the windowsill above the sink. She said each piece was a letter the water had finished reading — smoothed of all its sharp opinions.

I think of her hands in the dish soap, the light coming through green and amber, how even forgetting can be a kind of polish.