Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in broken shells and lengths of kelp cursive on the sand, each entry erased by the next wave's hand before anyone thinks to read it.

I found a moon snail's whorl at the wrack line, chambered like an ear still listening to a conversation the sea abandoned somewhere off the continental shelf.

There are things I meant to tell the water— how the light at six o'clock turns the shallows into poured brass, how the cormorants hold their wings open as if drying a grief they refuse to name.

But the ocean is not sentimental. It files everything under salt, returns what it wants in its own unrecognizable time.

And I have learned to love what does not keep— the foam script, the gull's syllable, the brief embassy of warmth where my foot pressed the wet ground.