Cartography of Forgetting

The atlas opens to a country I once knew— its rivers blue and certain, its mountain ranges named for storms that haven't happened yet.

I trace the coastline with a finger and find it soft, erasable, the way a face dissolves between two meetings.

What remains is the legend: symbols for marshland, for ruin, for roads that curved through someone's childhood and ended there.

Someone folded this map too many times. The creases have become their own geography, white lines where the ink no longer holds.

I close it. Outside, the city rearranges itself without asking. A street I trusted bends the other way.