The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastlines from memory now, the way the inlet curved like a question she never finished asking. Her pen hesitates where the harbor mouth would be, knowing the water has since moved on.

Every map is an argument with time— the mountain that still bears its colonial name, the road that became a field, the field that became a parking lot for a church that burned in 1987.

She shades the elevation with her thumb, smearing hills into the lowlands, the way grief does. What the legend cannot hold she leaves as blank white space.

At three in the morning the city breathes below her window, oblivious to its own revisions. She marks the place where her grandmother's house stood with a symbol she invented for things that no longer require a scale.