Salt Diary

The tide keeps no appointments yet arrives with such conviction, dragging its hem of foam across the stones we named for grandmothers.

I found a jar of sea glass on the shelf, each shard worn to the softness of a word repeated past its meaning — tourmaline, tourmaline, tourmaline.

What the salt teaches: that preservation and erosion are the same gesture, that the wave's retreat is also an embrace.

My mother kept a notebook filled with shoreline measurements, as if the distance between land and sea were something you could settle with a pencil and enough patience.

Tonight the water takes back what it lent us — driftwood, a sandal, the particular blue we thought belonged to afternoon. Nothing was ever ours to annotate.