Salt Diary

The tide keeps no appointments yet arrives with such precision you could set a life by it, the way my grandmother did, hanging laundry by the waterline.

Each morning the shore offers a revised draft of itself— driftwood rearranged like sentences, shells punctuating the sand where yesterday there was nothing to read.

I have tried to preserve the ocean in a jar. It loses its color within the hour, becomes just water with a grudge, cloudy and ordinary and still.

What the salt remembers is not the wave but the pull before it, that gathering tension when everything leans shoreward and hasn't yet decided to break.

We are all writing in a medium that dissolves our words as we form them. The best lines I ever spoke were taken by an offshore wind and delivered to someone I'll never meet.