Salt Theology

The estuary remembers in layers — silt and shell, the slow calligraphy of tides rewriting what the river said.

I walked there once in November, the grasses bleached to the color of old linen, of letters left too long in a window's persistent light.

A heron lifted from the shallows with the patience of a thing that knows its weight exactly, each wingbeat metered against the drag of air.

What I mistook for silence was the marsh breathing — the soft percussion of water finding its level in the reeds.

We are mostly salt, they tell us, and salt is only the ocean remembering itself on land, carrying the whole story in a single grain.