What the Salt Flat Keeps

At the edge of the dry lake, the ground remembers water the way skin remembers cold— a faint impression, a whiteness that won't wash off.

The mountains here wear their age openly, striped like the pages of a book left too long in the sun. No one reads them. They don't mind.

I brought my old grief to this place thinking the flatness would absorb it, that something so willing to hold the sky might take this too. It did not. But it looked.

A hawk passed over without casting shadow. The silence had a temperature— not warm, not cold, just present the way breath is present before you notice you are breathing.

I drove home with dust on my boots and something reset in the chest, not healed, not whole, just rearranged into a shape the body could carry again.