Salt Ledger

The tide keeps its accounts in foam, each wave a line item scratched across the wet slate of the shore, then cancelled before the ink sets.

I have watched the ocean do this since I was small enough to believe it was writing me a letter, that the froth spelled something only patience could decode.

Now I know the ledger balances to zero. Every deposit of shell and weed withdrawn by the next cold hand of water, the beach a struck-through page no auditor will ever reconcile.

Still, there is a profit somewhere— in the salt that stiffens my hair, the wood-rot smell of the pier at dusk, the way my feet remember the give of sand years after leaving.

The tide does not grieve its erasures. It lays down another line, another sum of light and sediment, and lets the margin speak for itself.