Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own ledger, columns of foam advancing and retreating across the wet slate of morning. I found your handwriting in the sand once, already dissolving at the vowels.

What the ocean remembers it remembers in salt — that patient mineral that outlasts the water carrying it. Every wave a sentence the shore is too slow to read.

There was a summer we catalogued shells by the sounds they refused to make, held each one to our ears and mistook our own blood for something ancient and far off.

Now the gulls wheel above the breakwater stitching the grey air shut, and I stand where the land loses its argument with the sea, pockets full of smooth, unreadable stones.