Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounts— each wave a stroke drawn back before the sentence ends, leaving only the faintest residue of what it meant to say.

I found a nautilus on the strand once, chambered like a cathedral no one attends anymore, its spiral still whispering the formula for how to grow by leaving.

Salt crusts the margins of everything here. The driftwood wears its white beard without apology, the rocks hold still beneath their slow erasure as if patience were a kind of music.

What the ocean takes it takes in whispers. What it returns arrives unrecognizable—tumbled glass, a shoe, the bleached atlas of a crab opened to a country with no name.

I write this at the waterline where every word is provisional, where the page itself is dissolving underfoot, and still the hand keeps moving.