Cartography of Salt

The tide draws back its cold hem and leaves the stones wet and readable, each one a sentence in a language you almost remember.

You walked here once before the house was sold, before the boxes swallowed the smell of rooms. The water doesn't know this. It keeps arriving with the same indifference, foam dissolving like a name you'd stopped saying.

What the sea does to glass: rounds it, milks it, makes it beautiful in the way that only long damage can. You fill your pockets with the evidence.

Somewhere in the distance a buoy marks the place where the channel deepens— not a warning, just an acknowledgment that some water has no floor worth finding.

You stay until the light goes amber, until the cold writes itself into your hands. Then you walk back up the shingle carrying what the sea saw fit to leave.