Tide Chart for the Unremembered

The harbor keeps no record of the boats that sheltered here through winter— only the waterline's slow fade on stone, a ring of salt left like a signature.

My grandmother pressed flowers she couldn't name, kept them between pages of a book she also couldn't name by the end. The pansies held their color longer than she held mine.

What the tide erases, it also carries forward. Somewhere offshore, a door is drifting— its paint the same blue as a kitchen I knew once, the knob still turned toward a room that no longer stands.

Even forgetting has a shape. Watch how the mind empties the way a bay empties at low water: not gone, but pulled back into something larger, still moving, still cold, still tasting of itself.