The Cartographer's Insomnia

She folds the coastline back along its crease, the way a letter returns to its envelope— continent tucked into continent, sea erased.

All night she redraws the delta, gives the river a different mouth, lets it empty somewhere drier, quieter, into a city that never flooded.

Her pencil knows the pressure of devotion: the fine hatching of hills, the spaced intervals that mean impassable. She names the unnamed places after things she lost and crosses them in blue.

By morning the map holds everything the world forgot to keep— a road between two people, the exact coordinates of a voice. She rolls it carefully, ties it with string, sets it where no one will find it soon enough.