Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounts— each wave a column of arrivals, each retreating hiss a sum the sand will never balance.

I found your handwriting in a shell, the cursive of some creature who pressed its whole life into calcium and left it on the ledge of April.

There are languages the body knows before the mind catches up: salt on the lip, the giving way of wet ground beneath a heel, the ache that names itself only in passing.

What the sea takes it returns altered—driftwood smooth as bone, glass worn to the green of sleep, a stone that fits the palm as though it had been waiting.

I am learning to read the way water reads a coast: not for meaning, but for shape, wearing each word thinner until it tells the truth.