The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world through paper — her father's hands spreading coastlines across the kitchen table like a confession, the ink still wet, smelling of iron and distance.

She memorized every river as if rivers were relatives, the way the Dnieper bends the same way her grandmother's spine curved in old photographs.

When she left, she did not take a map. She took only the habit of looking at the edges of things — where the forest thins, where the road stops having a name.

Now she draws her own: blank centers, uncertain margins, the cities she has lived in rendered smaller than the space between one breath and the next.

Some territories resist being known. She marks them with the old symbol — here be, here be — and lets the unnamed stay unnamed, and beautiful.