A NECKLACE OF WHISTLES, A HORIZON OF SALT

 

    ©tedorè

17 August 2025, coast

Afternoons on the coast have a way of undoing me. 

The whistle, small, delicate, absurd, slips between my lips, releasing the cry of a gull. 

And then, as if summoned, a bird carves across the sky, its wings cutting the fragile blue that is already bruising into rose. 

I do not know if it was answering me, or something I had not yet dared to name. 

The sea leaned closer, heavy with a pink shimmer, a tide rehearsing eternity, always returning, never the same. 

And I thought of you. 

How nearness often feels like this: a restless current, warm yet ungovernable, refusing definition, but leaving its salt in me nonetheless. 

The horizon unravelled like a wound and a promise at once, a letter stretched open toward your hands, a question the sea keeps repeating without reply. 

Here, nothing belongs to anyone. 

Not the bird, not the sky, not even the breath I used to mimic its call. 

And still, I find myself writing to you in the language of tides, because in the end, what else is there

but the flight against silence, the ache of wanting, the brief pink hour where the world remembers. 

Is it both infinite and fleeting? 

I left the shore with salt still on my lips, not knowing if it was sea or memory.