Cartography of Forgetting

The old maps lie folded in a drawer, creased at the rivers where my grandmother's hands pressed down the paper, tracing roads she no longer walks.

I have memorized the wrong things— the exact weight of a key in a coat pocket, the sound a screen door makes when the summer has swollen its frame. But not her voice. Not the particular way she said my name.

There is a cartography of forgetting where territories shrink inward each year, where the coastlines shift and whole provinces vanish between sleeping and waking, leaving only the smell of something coastal, something green.

I draw it anyway— the kitchen with its yellow light, the garden where the roses went leggy and wild, the window she stood at each morning watching the street fill up with strangers.

What remains is not the country itself but the feeling of its weather on the skin: the way a cold front moving through makes you reach, without thinking, for someone who is no longer there.