Cartography of Forgetting

The river does not mourn its earlier bends, those oxbow cuts left behind in the fields to go green and still and forget they were water.

I have done the same with certain years— let them silt over, let the cattails move in, let the herons mistake them for permanence.

A cartographer once told me every map is already wrong before the ink dries. The coast is eating itself. The mountain is falling in love with the sea.

What I remember of you is already a different country— the borders redrawn by sleep, the cities renamed by grief.

Still, I keep the old map. I trace the roads with my finger in the dark, not to find my way back but to feel how far the land has moved.