Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in cursive, each wave a sentence abandoned before the period arrives.

I found your handwriting in the foam— the same loose vowels, the same way of leaning into a word as if it might hold your weight.

Salt dries white on the pilings, a residue of arguments the ocean has already forgotten. Barnacles remember longer than water does.

Somewhere a boat rests on its side, hull open to the rain like a palm reading its own fortune. The keel says: you were built for leaving.

I sit where the sand turns firm, that contested ground neither land nor sea will claim, and let the tide erase the one word I came here to say.