Cartography of Salt

The maps we drew of each other were always wrong at the edges— coastlines guessed, inlets unnamed, the interior left white and vast.

You pointed once to a harbor you said you'd anchored in as a child, and I understood then that every person carries a country no one else can enter.

Now the paper has grown soft where I folded it, the creases blurring the roads between us. I trace them anyway with a finger, learning the topography of what remained.

Salt comes from distance, from the sea that fills whatever gap the land won't hold. I have collected so much of it— enough to cure everything I couldn't say.