Salt Theater

The tide rehearses its one act— arrival, the slow ovation of foam, then the long retreat across stones that forget each wave the moment it withdraws.

I have watched this theater for hours, the way salt deposits its cursive on the dark shelves of rock, each phrase illegible by evening, rewritten by the next swell at dawn.

There was a summer I believed the ocean kept a catalog of us— our footprints archived in the continental shelf, our laughter folded into the wood of driftwood. I was younger then, and wrong.

What the water holds is not memory but the habit of motion, the way a hand returns to touch the same scar on the table, not remembering the knife, only the groove.

Tonight the shore is empty. The waves arrive to no audience, performing anyway their bright demolitions, and I think this is the truest thing— how the world continues its gorgeous work whether or not we are there to name it.