Tea, tide and a translated lullaby

Nina Simone's "Wild Is the Wind" murmurs from the turntable while bergamot steam fogs the window seat. The harbor slips its light across the lighthouse floor and my father's clipped Igbo proverbs keep finding their way into my margins.

I sent a short tide-poem to the man in his late forties and he replied with a photograph of his coat, salt on the collar; the woman my age read a stanza back to me in Swedish and her laugh redrew the room. Love here is correspondence—letters threaded through candlelight, scarves used like punctuation, a small, shared alphabet of tides and footnotes.