Cartography of Salt

The old maps named the ocean with the names of storms that crossed it— each passage drawn in the ink of what survived.

We do not name things until we lose them. The word for harbor means: where you did not drown. The word for home means: the window you still see in dreams.

I have been charting the distances between the last meal we shared and this silence, the length of a hallway measured in absence, the weight of a name said into an empty room.

What I know of grief is this: it has a coastline that keeps moving, retreating when you look directly at it, advancing when you turn away to sleep.

Salt crystallizes on every shore the same way— patient, recursive, indifferent to meaning. And yet we read the tide-lines like a text, certain there is something being said to us.