Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in the sand, each entry erased before the ink dries, and still it writes — devoted to the act of almost saying something.

I found a shell with a hole worn through where the ocean had pressed its thumb for a hundred patient years. It whistled when I held it to the wind.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass on the kitchen sill, each fragment a sentence the waves had edited down to pure color, pure curve.

She said the sea never finishes anything, just pushes it back and forth until the sharp edges dissolve and what remains is worth holding.

Tonight the harbor smells of rust and kelp. A freighter blinks at the horizon's seam. I am learning her kind of patience — to let the draft go, to trust the revision.