Cartography of Salt

The estuary remembers every river that poured itself into its mouth — each silt-heavy current, each cold tributary arriving like a letter with no return address.

We drove through the flats at low tide, the mud gleaming like hammered copper, and you named the birds by their silhouettes: how absence gives a thing its shape.

Later, the map showed only blue where we had walked on exposed ground. Cartographers are afraid of the in-between — they choose a single moment, call it true.

What I keep is not the coastline but the way the light changed before rain, how the whole sky held its breath and the herons didn't move.

Salt stays long after water leaves. That is the only fact I trust — that everything that touches us leaves its mineral, its residue, its name.