Salt Dialogue

The tide keeps its own minutes, scratching them into the cliff face where no one thinks to read.

I found a shell this morning wearing the blueprint of a creature that outlived its softness by a thousand years, its calcium cursive still legible against the pad of my thumb.

There is a conversation happening between the salt and the stone— one of them always dissolving, the other learning to call erosion a caress.

The fishermen mend their nets at dusk, fingers moving through the same knots their fathers tied, and their fathers before, each repair a small prophecy that something will be caught and released.

I want to tell the sea I understand its repetition now— not as failure but as practice, the way a mouth shapes a word it has loved too long to pronounce.