What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of every map she drew there was a whiteness that was not absence but a holding back, the page breathing before it spoke.

She said the unnamed places kept themselves that way on purpose— not wilderness, not waiting, but something that had already happened and chosen not to be written.

I think of her hands on the vellum, pressing down as if to feel the warmth of somewhere else, the ghost-heat of a river that ran before the river.

What we call forgetting is the cartographer walking home at dusk, her instruments still warm, the new coastline folded inside her coat.

She will not draw it yet. She is still deciding what shape a thing takes when it refuses to be found.