Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in the rocks, each entry worn softer than the last, and I have come here to read what remains— the blurred word for longing, the smudged signature of a wave.

My grandmother pressed flowers between psalms. I press my palm against wet stone and feel the cold catalogue of years, how salt undoes everything with the patience of someone who loves you.

There is a shelf where the water will not reach until it does. I have placed there a smooth piece of glass, green as a bottle that once held something worth keeping. The ocean will take it back. I know this.

Still, I return with my pockets full— shells with their spiral arguments, a crab claw delicate as calligraphy, the rope-end frayed into a white brush that could paint nothing but the wind.

What the sea gives me is not the thing itself but the discipline of letting go, how every retreating wave leaves the sand swept clean, ready again to hold a brief, bare foot.