What the Salt Remembers

The tide pulls back like a held breath and leaves behind its argument in sand— a scatter of shells, the calcified grammar of creatures that once insisted on existing.

You walked here once without knowing you were being memorized. The water has no loyalty, only appetite, and still it keeps returning to the same shore.

At dusk the light goes flat and honest. The horizon stops performing distance and simply is—a seam between two silences, one that moves, one that stays.

I've been learning to want less from what cannot hold its shape. The salt in the air remembers nothing, and yet it finds my lips like recognition.