Granular Debt

Salt crystals scrape against the tongue with a gritty sharpness, stinging amidst a white desert of dunes. Each grain plucked from this undulating wavefront depletes the landscape's total weight, an exchange where extraction exacts its own toll on the limbs. The body grows heavy and sluggish, resisting further motion as if burdened by the phantom pressure of every lost particle. As these rhythmic intervals of taking continue, a quiet stillness settles over the shifting sands.