Salt Diary

The tide keeps a ledger no one audits— each wave a line item of surrendered glass, crab shells inventoried and struck through, the whole coast a margin note in someone else's argument with depth.

I found your handwriting in the wet sand once, or what I chose to read as yours: a razor clam's hinge mark, two dragging kelp stems crossing like the t's you never bothered with. The sea closed the notebook before I finished.

There is a salt that survives boiling, that rides steam into the rafters of kitchens where women stood for decades stirring without measuring, their wrists keeping a time signature the clock ignored.

I think the ocean remembers the way a jar remembers— not the honey itself but the slow amber residue, the sweetness that won't wash clean, that changes the next thing poured in.