Cartography of Salt

The coast does not remember us, only the shape our absence made— a hollow in the sand where we stood watching the tide rehearse its forgetting.

You mapped the sea by its silences: the pause before a wave collapses, the moment salt suspends between dissolving and the long pull back to depth.

I kept the postcards. Their colors have gone the way of cut flowers, the blues draining into one gray that is not quite sky, not quite water.

What remains is this: the weight of something that was almost said, still warm, still turning, like kelp in a current that has no shore.

The cartographers were wrong— the edge of the world is not where the ocean ends but where it learns your name and speaks it only to the wind.