Cartography of Salt

The estuary remembers what the river forgot— how water learns to slow before it vanishes, how silt settles into shapes that look like staying.

I have stood at the edge of what I meant to say and watched the words go tidal, pulling back through gravel and exposed root.

There is a kind of cartography in grief: you draw the coastline as it was, not as the sea has since revised it, and wonder why the map keeps lying to you.

The salt does not mourn the fresh water. It takes what arrives and makes it into something neither one could be alone— brackish, luminous, briefly still.