Tide Without Name

The estuary keeps no record of what we whisper into its current— only the curve of settling silt, the way light bends where salt dissolves.

You gather stones in your palms as though accumulation were a language, each one smooth as a forgetting, warm as the answer you'll never ask.

The tide moves without memory, pulls everything toward the open throat of ocean, and we stand at the threshold pretending we know the difference between release and loss.

Something in the water remembers us the way breath remembers the shape of singing, brief, essential, already dissolving into the vast indifference of arrival.