The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws coastlines from memory in the dark hours, her hand tracing the shape of water she has never touched.

The peninsula curves like a sentence left unfinished. She adds a name in the margin — not the official name, the one the fishermen used before the war.

Every map is a letter to the dead, a way of saying: I know where you were. Here, the salt flats. Here, the road that bent east before it ended.

She folds the paper before morning. The cities press against each other, capitals kissing through the crease, distances collapsed to nothing.