Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits, depositing its silver along the rocks where barnacles hold on like small, clenched prayers.

I found a notebook swollen with brine, its pages fused into a single illegible psalm — someone's summer pressed flat beneath the weight of water.

What the salt preserves it also changes: wood goes soft, iron blooms rust-orange, and every name carved into the pier becomes a mouth the wind reads through.

At dusk the harbor smells of diesel and iodine. A cormorant folds itself onto a piling, patent-black, indifferent to the hour.

I wanted to keep something whole. The sea said: here is how I keep things — scattered, rinsed, returned in a different shape each morning.