About Unwritten

There’s a harbor I keep coming back to, though I couldn’t tell you anymore if it’s mine or if I’ve just decided to believe it is.

Some nights I dress the shoreline for company that doesn’t come. The smell of salt in my hair, something borrowed from a life I used to have, a light I carry down to the water and set just so, in case anyone out there is looking for it. I don’t know why I keep doing this. Maybe it’s less about being found and more about proving to myself that I still know how to shine.

The lighthouse turns, but never toward me. It has other coastlines to warn, other ships it’s sworn to. I understand. A keeper can’t watch every shore at once, and the fog out there is thicker than anything I’ve had to face in here. Still. A keeper who never misses a single passing ship, who wakes at the faintest horn from a stranger’s vessel, and somehow always sleeps through mine.

I said something about it once, the way you toss a bottle out and don’t really expect the tide to bring it back. It’s been a long time since the light found this shore. The water just kept moving. Nothing washed up in return.

There were other harbors, before this one, where I never had to leave a lamp burning all night to be seen. The tide came in on its own rhythm and I trusted it the way you trust breathing. I don’t trust it here. And underneath the missing, it is something smaller and uglier that I don’t like admitting, a doubt that maybe the shoreline itself has gone plain, that whatever used to pull the water toward me has quietly dried up.

There was a season we were meant to build something together on this coast, something that needed its own tide, its own narrow window between moons, that wouldn’t wait for anyone’s convenience. I read the water for both of us. I marked when the current would be right and folded it into a bottle and set it out to reach him.

It came back today. Unopened. The wax seal gone soft and unreadable, the message inside long since dissolved, and he asked, easily, like it cost him nothing, if I’d send another.

I think of how many other bottles reach him without delay. How the ones stamped with someone else’s name never dissolve at sea. Only mine.

There’s a stone I’ve been carrying that has nothing to do with the shore. It sits low, under the ribs, the kind of weight that doesn’t announce itself so much as simply refuse to leave. Weeks of it now. I don’t have a use for it yet. I’m only setting it down here because it was getting too heavy to carry alone in the dark.

If you know this harbor, the lamp lit for no one, the bottle that keeps washing back, I don’t need to explain the rest to you.

You already know what the tide didn’t bring.