Salt Ledger

The tide keeps its own accounts— each wave a line drawn and struck through, the shore a palimpsest of arrivals no one asked for.

I found a jar of sea glass on the sill where my grandmother left it, each piece worn to the color of held breath, green as the underside of a word she never finished saying.

What the salt takes it returns in different form: driftwood for bone, foam for the lace she wore to church, a horizon stitched so tightly to the sky you forget they were ever separate.

Some nights the waves sound like pages turning in a book left open on the porch, and I almost believe the ocean is reading us back to ourselves— finding the lines we underlined in sleep.

I close the jar. The glass clicks like small, surviving teeth. Outside, the tide revises everything again, and I let it.