Salt Cartography

The tide does not remember which stones it has already turned. It comes again with the same hunger, the same white hands.

We drew a map once on the wet sand— your finger tracing the river where your grandmother walked barefoot, the estuary she called by a name no longer on any border.

By evening the map was sea. Not erased, you said. Translated. The water learned it, held it the way salt holds everything it has ever touched.

I think of that now when I forget the sound of your voice mid-sentence, how the syllables go first, then the shape of the breath before them, then something I cannot name because it was never a word.

What the ocean knows it keeps below the place where light stops. Cold and whole and dark and still, the salt does not forget. It simply holds it at a depth we cannot reach and call it ours.