The Cartographer of Tides

She draws the coastline every morning, knowing the sea will revise it by noon— a patient argument between pencil and water, the land always losing a little.

Her maps are archives of what almost was: a cove that swallowed itself in winter, a spit of sand the storms renamed, the inlet that forgot its own mouth.

She doesn't mourn the changes. She traces them the way you'd trace a scar— not grief, but a kind of reading, the body's honest record of what touched it.

At dusk the tide withdraws like a held breath and the wet flats mirror a sky going copper. She folds her work. Tomorrow the shore will be different again, will still be the shore.