Cartography of Salt

The tide comes in to erase what the tide left behind— a continuous argument with itself, the shore its only witness.

I have watched the sanderlings chase the retreating water, small feet blurring into froth, always almost catching the edge of something that was never meant to be caught.

A child drew a map here once. She named every inlet, every buried shell, pressed her palm into wet sand and called the impression home.

By evening it was already legend— altered by wind, by the weight of a stranger's boot, by the sea's long indifference to all our careful naming.

Still, something remains in the body the way salt remains after water leaves: a white residue, a ghost geography, the shape of everything we loved that the world continued without.