Salt Flats at Dusk

The horizon here is a ruler laid flat, pressing down on everything that wanted to rise. You walk and the ground gives nothing back, white and indifferent as a page before the first word.

A heron passes once, its shadow longer than the bird, longer than reason, trailing across the crust like a signature no one asked for.

The sun goes slowly, as if unsure it should leave this place unwitnessed. It paints the brine pools pink, then violet, colors borrowed from some other geography, returned now, briefly, to this one.

You stop. The silence isn't absence— it is the residue of the sea that was here before you, that will be here in some form after, patient as mineral, patient as salt.