Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one visits, shelving its volumes in sand and froth, each wave a page turned too quickly to read.

I found a word there once — salt-blurred, half-dissolved against a mussel shell — and held it to the light like a coin from a country that no longer exists.

The librarian is the wind, cataloguing by erosion, filing everything under loss. But the collection keeps growing.

At dusk the water turns the color of old ink, and I swear I can hear it composing — not for us, not for anyone, just the restless need to set things down.

I leave my footprints as a signature on the borrower's card. By morning the sea will have reshelved them somewhere I cannot follow.