Salt Dialect

The tide speaks a dialect I almost remember, consonants of gravel drawn back through themselves, vowels that open like the mouths of caves where water has been practicing for centuries.

My grandmother kept jars of sea glass on the sill, syllables worn smooth by argument with shore, each one a word the ocean decided it no longer needed.

I have been trying to translate the salt. It tastes like distance, like the space between what happened and what we say happened, that blue margin where the map gives up and lets the color carry everything.

Some nights the fog arrives literate, pressing its wet alphabet to the windows, and I read it with my palms the way she taught me— not for meaning, but for temperature, for the weight of what the air has carried here.

I am learning that fluency is not mastery but surrender, the moment you stop reaching for the word and let the wave finish its own sentence.