The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the borders of what she no longer knows— the coastline where her mother's voice used to break against the shore.

The roads she traces end mid-sentence, trails swallowed by blank paper, the way a name dissolves before it reaches the tongue.

What remains: texture without content, the warmth of a kitchen she cannot locate, the particular weight of a hand in hers whose face has become weather.

She folds the map along its failures, creases marking the sites of departure, and carries it anyway— this archive of erasure, still useful, still hers.