The Cartographer's Insomnia

She spreads the unfinished atlas across the bed, each coastline ending where attention failed, rivers stopping mid-syllable in the country she kept meaning to name.

The lamp holds its yellow breath. Outside, the neighbor's dog marks every fence post with the same insistence she brings to borders that refuse to stay.

She traces a mountain range with her thumb, feeling nothing, then feeling the elevation— how a line, repeated, becomes the shape of something true.

In the margins she has written: *here the water sweetens.* *Here the road forgets its purpose.* *Here a woman once stood still long enough to be mistaken for a landmark.*

By morning she will fold the whole thing wrong, creases cutting through the capital cities, and carry it anyway, the way you carry a map of a place you've already left.