Cartography of Salt

The old maps showed coastlines that no longer exist — whole spits of land swallowed back into gray water, their names floating offshore like kelp.

My grandmother kept a jar of sand from the beach where she was born. By the time she died, the beach was gone too, and neither of them knew it.

Now I carry the jar, and the sand inside has shifted into new shapes with every move — I am not sure it remembers the water that made it.

Some geographies only exist in the body that held them: the slope of a shoulder, the smell of cedar, the way a voice could fill a room and leave no echo when it stopped.

What we call forgetting is only the coastline changing shape, the sand moving where it needs to go, the map revising itself without apology.