Salt Flats at Dusk

The salt flats hold the light long after the sun has quit its argument with the horizon. A white that isn't white — more bone, more the memory of water.

You walk out and the ground gives nothing back, no echo of your step, no shadow worth naming. The silence here has mass, presses against the eardrums like a held breath inside a bell.

In the distance, a mirage assembles itself out of heat and want: city, sea, the face of someone you stopped being able to picture. It dissolves before you reach it, as all such things do.

What remains is the sky's patience, its willingness to go on being enormous without asking anything of you. The first stars appear where the blue thins. You are very small, and this is enough.