Salt Library

The tide keeps a library no one can visit, shelved in the gaps between waves— each volume a house dismantled softly, each page a handful of sand the current has memorized and released.

I found a doorknob once, green with patience, half-buried where the dunes began to stutter. It opened nothing but the afternoon went wide anyway, light sprawling through a room that wasn't there.

The jellyfish drift like lanterns left burning after a festival. They carry no weight, no argument, only the slow persuasion of something almost transparent becoming beautiful.

Fishermen say the water remembers every hull, every net dragged across its conversation. I believe them the way I believe a struck bell keeps singing in some frequency below the floor of hearing.

Tonight the shore exhales its salt, and I stand where the land loses confidence, where each wave writes a sentence then rethinks it— that hesitation, I have come to love.