Salt Cartography

The tide has its own grammar— a syntax of withdrawing, each wave a sentence erased before it can mean anything.

You showed me how salt forms crystals on driftwood after the sea retreats, white constellations mapping what the water once held.

I have been cataloguing these patterns the way cartographers once drew coastlines from rumor and longing, believing a shore would appear if you named it carefully enough.

Some mornings the light arrives sideways across the flats, and everything that was buried is briefly visible: the bones of boats, a child's red shoe, the outline of a harbor no one remembers.

The salt keeps writing its small maps. I keep reading them wrong, finding in every crystalline graph the same imprecise coordinates— somewhere, the place you stood, the tide just beginning to turn.