Cartography of Salt

The tide comes back the way grief does — unhurried, certain, carrying the old names of stones.

She taught me to read water before I could read words, pointing where the light goes thin, where the bottom drops away like a held breath.

Now I trace the shoreline from a photograph, my finger pressing glass as if the cold were still something I could enter.

The sea does not remember her. It only keeps repeating itself the way the body does, years after — breath, and breath, and breath.

What cartographers forget to mark: the place you stood when someone became the past.