The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning she unfolds the map again, smooths its creases with the flat of her hand the way you might quiet a frightened animal. The coastlines she drew are wrong. They were always wrong.

She learned early that rivers change course without announcing themselves, that the mountain she named for her father has no fixed summit, only weather — a different altitude depending on the season.

The cities keep moving. She marks them with small red circles that bleed into the paper overnight, spreading like the knowledge that certainty is a country with no border.

She folds the map back along its original wounds, the same creases that will eventually split, the paper thinning to transparency at every place she's tried to say: here. I mean here.