Salt Tide

The harbor holds its breath at dusk, light folding into the water like paper, each fold a year the seabirds remember.

I've forgotten the names of ships, the dates when tides turned, but my hands still know the shape of rope, of knots that won't untie, of salt that crystallizes on skin and tastes like every leaving.

The waves don't apologize. They erase what they touch and begin again without ceremony, their rhythm older than words, older than the want to stay.

Sometimes I find shells that hold the sound of something deeper— not the ocean's voice, but the silence between its speakers, the pause before the wave remembers it was once a drop, singular, impossibly small, refusing to be still.