The Cartographer's Last Survey

She drew the coastline from memory, the inlet where her father's boat had moored, the soft erasure of the tide pulling sand from under everything she knew.

The pencil wore down to its wood. She pressed harder, as if pressure could make the land stay where she had left it.

Somewhere, the actual shore is doing what shores do— yielding, accumulating, indifferent to its own record.

She rolls the map and ties it with a strip of cloth from an old shirt. Outside, fog has taken the mountains as collateral.

What we chart is never the place. It is the moment before we looked away, held in paper, thinning at every fold.