Cartography of Salt

The tide goes out the way a name leaves the mouth — slowly, then all at once, dragging its hem of foam across the sand until only the dark wet mark remains, proof of something that was here.

My grandmother kept a jar of sea glass she called her broken dictionary, each shard a word worn smooth by the long argument between water and shore, meaning rubbed off, the shape still holding.

I have walked that shoreline before knowing what the body already mapped: the way grief salts every surface it touches, how the horizon is only a limit if you forget the earth curves beyond it.

Somewhere the light is still striking the same water she taught me to name, the wave neither arriving nor leaving but folded in the exact moment of becoming — a grammar no alphabet can hold.