What the Salt Flats Keep

The salt flats hold everything that ever dissolved here — mineral patience, the bleached arithmetic of vanished seas.

A woman walked this white thirty years before the road came, leaving no more than the pressure of her heel, which the crust erased by noon.

Still, something persists. Light bends differently where a body passed. The air learns the weight of what it carried, then carries it longer than bone would.

Out here, distance is not a measure but a mood — the mountains floating, unmoored from their own shadows, uncertain which direction holds them.

I came to see the nothing. Found instead the record of erasure: how the world keeps its losses the way a mirror keeps a face.