What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps lied with such elegance— coastlines softened where the rocks were sharp, towns named for saints no one remembered still burning in their careful ink.

My grandmother kept one folded in her Bible, a country that no longer answered to that name. She traced its borders with one finger the way you might touch a scar.

There is a kind of faithfulness in error: the mapmaker who drew the mountains taller must have stood at their feet once, afraid, wanting you to be afraid too.

I have my own cartography— rooms I've mapped as larger than they were, voices placed in doorways where no one stood, the distance between us measured wrong.

What we leave out is not dishonesty. It is the white space where the sea kept doing what the sea does, indifferent to our need for edges.