What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew coastlines until her hands forgot the difference between land and water, each inlet a held breath, each cape a sentence interrupted.

The white spaces were not empty. They were the places she had stood and found the world too large to hold in ink.

Along the margins she wrote: *here the river argues with the sea, here the fog comes in the shape of a grandmother, here a name I have no right to keep.*

After she died we found the drawer— hundreds of small corrections, towns moved closer to the mountains than they actually were.

We understood then. She was not mapping the world. She was mapping the world as it felt to be leaving it.