The Cartographer's Daughter

She grew up folding rivers back into drawers, learning that the world could be pressed flat, that distance was a color — ochre for desert, blue-gray for anything that once held grief.

Her father drew borders with a trembling hand, called it precision, called it love, the way a line on paper could keep two hungers from touching.

She inherited his tools but not his faith in edges. She traces coastlines the way water does — not to contain but to remember where it yielded.

Now she maps what won't lie still: the migration of a smell through a closed house, the slow erosion of a name no one has spoken in years.

Every cartographer is lost inside their work. She folds the last chart carefully, places it in the drawer where rivers sleep, and steps outside into the unmeasured dark.