Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits, each wave a sentence half-erased before the next one takes the page.

I found your handwriting in the driftwood grain, the way a knot can hold a year of wind and still smell like the living tree.

There is a dialect the salt speaks only to iron — ask any hull how rust begins as trust, one molecule offering itself to the water.

By evening the beach has forgotten every foot that pressed its name there. I envy that — the clean slate, the willingness to be revised.

But somewhere past the breakers the ledger balances itself: what the shore loses, the deep floor collects, and nothing the sea has taken is truly spent.