What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps called the sea Here Be Dragons because the cartographer feared emptiness more than monsters, needed something to fill the white.

My grandmother kept a drawer of rubber bands gone brittle, a spool of thread the color of nothing, buttons that belonged to coats she could no longer name. She called this keeping, which was different from saving.

When she died we found no map of her interior, no legend for the distances she held— between the country she left and the one that left her, between the daughter she raised and the woman she became in the leaving.

I have been drawing the outline of her silence for years. Each time I reach the edge I mark it: *here*. I mark it *be*. I do not write the rest because the rest is where I live.