Salt Diary

The tide keeps a journal in kelp and broken glass, each entry revised by the next wave's hand. I found a sentence once, half-legible, pressed into wet sand like a thumbprint— something about wanting to stay.

Fishermen mend nets at the concrete pier, their fingers quick with a grammar older than any alphabet. The knots hold because they remember the shape of almost-losing.

There is a salt in me that answers when the wind turns landward, a residue of summers I can't place— the burn of a rope swing letting go, water closing over a shout of joy.

My grandmother kept sea glass in a jar on a shelf too high for children. She said each piece was a letter the ocean had opened, read, and smoothed into silence.

Tonight the harbor smells of diesel and stars. I write nothing down. The waves will get it wrong anyway, and that is how it survives.