Cartography of the Unnamed

There are places the mapmaker left blank — not from ignorance but from a kind of mercy, the way a parent withholds certain truths until the child has grown enough to hold them. A creek without a name still carries snowmelt to the valley, still reflects the heron's patient silhouette, still speaks in the only language water knows. I have stood at the edge of such spaces, where the contour lines simply stop and the legend offers no color for what lives beyond the fold. Perhaps the finest cartography is the one that admits its limits — that draws the coastline faithfully then lets the ocean be the ocean. I keep an atlas of these blanks, pages worn soft at the margins where my finger traced the unnamed and found it was enough to wonder.