Cartography of Salt

The tide does not remember what it erased— the name you traced in wet sand, the hollow where your knee pressed down. It comes back anyway, methodical, touching every place it touched before.

I have been trying to map the shoreline but the shoreline keeps moving. What I charted at dawn is underwater now, and something new gleams in its place, stranded and strange and briefly itself.

There is a kind of salt that accumulates in the body after long grief— not bitter, not sharp, just present the way a stone is present in the riverbed it has always known.

You asked what I remember. I remember the light was low and coming sideways. I remember the table between us had a grain like a river running west. I remember almost everything except the ending.