Cartography of Salt

The tide does not remember the shore it carved last century, does not mourn the bluff it thinned to nothing, grain by grain. Only the land holds the wound, keeps the shape of what was taken.

My grandmother's hands knew salt the way a pilot knows fog— not by seeing but by the press of it, the way the air thickens and everything familiar disappears.

She folded dough at the same hour each morning until she did not, and the kitchen became a room where something used to happen. I measure flour now into the same bowl and cannot stop my hands from shaking.

There is a word in Portuguese, she told me once, for the longing you feel for something that may never have existed. I thought she meant a place. I think now she meant herself.

The sea keeps no maps. It erases and erases and calls this honesty. We are the ones who go on drawing coastlines that have already changed.