Salt Library

The tide keeps a collection of everything we've said near water — each whisper catalogued by salinity, filed under the moon's current phase.

I found my grandfather's laugh once, tangled in bladder wrack at low tide, still warm, still carrying the shape of a Sunday kitchen.

The librarian is the undertow. She pulls the heavy volumes seaward, rebinds them in sand and phosphorescence, then shelves them where the continental shelf drops into its own blue silence.

Nothing is lost, she insists, only re-translated — word by word into the dialect of waves, which has no past tense.

And so we keep speaking to the shore, depositing our small, salted texts, trusting that somewhere in the deep stacks a current knows our name by heart.