Salt Diary

The tide keeps no journal but the rocks remember every visit— grooves worn like cursive into basalt, each letter a century of arrival and retreat.

I found a conch half-buried where the dunes lose their nerve, its chambers still holding the argument between air and water, neither one willing to leave first.

My grandmother pressed sea glass into the kitchen windowsill so the light would enter already altered, already carrying the story of some bottle that chose to become jewelry.

There is a salt in us that answers to the pull of distant water. We stand at the shore and feel it— the old debt of the body, the installment we keep paying back in tears.