The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory, the way the land folds back on itself like a letter read too many times.

Her ink knows what the eye forgets— the estuary's slow brown hesitation, the cliff that leans into the sea as though listening for something drowned.

By morning the map has grown a village she never visited, its streets named after sounds: the creak of a gate in wind, rain on a tin roof, silence.

She traces the roads that led out and does not draw them returning. Every border is a question the land asks and the land answers in a language older than staying.

The finished map shows everywhere she has never been, and somewhere in its white unmeasured margins the place she came from quietly folds itself smaller.