Salt Registers

The tide keeps its own ledger, each wave a line item entered and struck through in the same breath, foam signatures dissolving before the sand can read them.

I have watched the salt flats harden into tablets no one asked for — white pronouncements on evaporation, on what remains when wanting leaves, the residue of thirst.

There are registers we carry without knowing: the pitch of a door that closed years ago, the exact weight of a glass set down by someone who has since become weather.

The ocean does not grieve its ledgers. It sends another column shoreward, tallies the broken shells, debits the cliff face one more grain toward the true accounting.

And we, the interim auditors, stand ankle-deep in the returns, mistaking the cold for permanence, the roar for an answer, when it was only the next entry being made.