The Cartographer's Daughter

She grew up tracing coastlines her father left unfinished, the pencil grooves worn soft by years of wondering.

Every blank edge of the known world was a door left slightly open— she learned to read the white space the way others learn their own names.

He told her: the sea doesn't care about accuracy. It erodes, it invents, it swallows what we build to contain it.

She kept his instruments anyway— the parallel rules, the dividers, the compass needle trembling toward something that had no fixed address.

Now she maps other things: the silences between words, the distances grief keeps from one year to the next.