Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can enter, shelved with the logbooks of dissolved ships, every page a thin sheet of brine that rewrites itself against the rocks before anyone thinks to read it.

I found a corridor once at low water— barnacled columns, the smell of ink gone mineral. Each alcove held a different silence: the hush of kelp, the pause between two waves.

Somewhere in the stacks a librarian made entirely of foam catalogs the things we said at shorelines, filing them under weather, cross-referenced with the phase of the moon.

She tells me nothing is lost, only reshelved in salt. That every word spoken near the sea is taken down, verbatim, then translated into the language of tides.

I believe her the way I believe rain— not because it argues, but because it arrives.