Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in broken shells and the cursive of foam across basalt, each entry revised before the ink dries.

I found your handwriting in the salt flats— vowels worn smooth as sea glass, consonants dissolving at the margins where the water pretends to leave.

There is a language older than grammar spoken by the way sand holds a footprint just long enough to prove someone stood here, faced the wind, and chose not to turn back.

The gulls carry off what the waves compose. Nothing is lost, only translated into the dialect of distance— that white noise the horizon makes when it swallows the last sliver of light.

I am learning to read these rough pages, to accept the smudged passages, the lines the current has redacted. Every erasure a kind of emphasis.