The Cartographer's Last Survey

She draws the coastline from memory now, her hands moving over the paper the way water moves over stone— patient, wearing something away.

The peninsula she surveyed at thirty has given three kilometers back to the sea. She does not correct the old map. She folds it carefully, as one folds a letter that can no longer be sent.

What persists: the interior hills, the way a river refuses the valley carved for it, the name of a village that outlasted its houses. What shifts: everything at the edge, everything the tide considers its own argument.

She traces the new shoreline in pencil. Not uncertainty—she knows where the land ends— but an acknowledgment that tomorrow she may need to move it again, and the map must be willing.