Cartography of Forgetting

The old maps named the gaps between known places: *here be dragons*, *terra incognita*, as if the blank was only waiting for someone brave enough to walk through it.

My grandmother's hands knew the table's grain the way a river knows its bed— by pressure, by return, by the slow wearing of the same familiar path. Now she traces shapes no one else can read.

I keep a bowl of stones from the shore where we used to count the gulls. Each one holds the weight of a specific afternoon, though I can't say anymore which afternoon, only that it was warm, and she was laughing.

There are places the mind empties out like tide retreating from a basin— not lost, just redistributed, some other self collecting it farther down the coast.