Cartography of Salt

The coast keeper draws her maps at low tide, marking what the water abandoned overnight— smooth stones the color of old teeth, kelp like a language no one translates anymore.

She has charted every inlet where her father stood casting a line into the grey patience of morning. The line going down and down, a question the water kept.

Now the same water returns different, reshuffles the sandbars, refuses the old shorelines. She redraws the margins in pencil, knowing tomorrow they will be wrong again.

There is a kind of love that works like tides— it does not stay, but it keeps coming back with its arms full of what it pulled from somewhere deeper, dropping it at your feet, wordless, glistening.

She folds the map along its creases. Outside, the sea is doing what the sea does: erasing, insisting, erasing, and calling it memory.