Salt Diary

The tide keeps its own accounts, depositing a fringe of kelp and glass where yesterday there was only sand, each wave a sentence half-retracted before the period lands.

I found a notebook swollen shut with brine, its pages fused into a single illegible leaf. Someone had written the way you write when no one will read it— leaning hard into the ink.

Salt preserves and salt erodes. The fisherman's wife knew this, hanging nets in the low sun until they stiffened into lattices of light, each knot a small, practical prayer.

What I want to keep I hold the way the shore holds driftwood: loosely, knowing the next surge will rearrange the whole collection, and that rearrangement is the collection.

Tonight the water pulls back far enough to show the rocks we walk above without thinking. For a moment everything is visible— then the wave returns, and writes again.