The Cartographer's Insomnia

He traces coastlines on the bedroom ceiling, fingers drawing borders where the plaster cracks, and every fissure is a river he has never crossed, every water stain an archipelago still waiting for its name.

The atlas on the nightstand falls open to a country that no longer exists— its capital pronounced only by the old, its mountains folded into someone else's flag. He memorizes it anyway, the way one memorizes a face.

Outside, the streetlamp throws a continent of light across the wet pavement. He watches it shrink as the bulb flickers, whole provinces swallowed back into the dark, and thinks: this is how forgetting works.

By morning he will have charted every shadow in the room, every drawer and its cardinal direction. He will rise with the coordinates of small, ordinary things— the coffee pot due south, the door due gone.