Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounts — each wave a line drawn and erased, the shore's ledger never balancing.

I found a mussel shell this morning, hinged open like a book whose pages the salt had already read and returned, blank, to the sand.

There is a language the water speaks only to things it is dissolving: the dock posts, the rope, the hull paint flaking into blue.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on a windowsill facing east. She called them the ocean's apologies — all those broken bottles worn down to something you could love.

Tonight the harbour smells of iron and kelp. A bell rings somewhere past the breakwater, counting nothing, and I listen as though it were enough.