What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew the rivers first, their blue a guess, a promise held at arm's length. The mountains she left as hatching, crosshatched shadow where the eye gives up.

The town she grew up in appears as a small circle, unnamed, the way a person might point at a place they can no longer return to.

There is a legend in the corner explaining symbols she invented: the broken line for roads that end in fields, the hollow star for what was once a lighthouse.

At the edge of the page, the sea is just white. Not absence — she told me once — but everything the map admits it cannot hold.

She folded it along the rivers, creased the mountains flat. Somewhere in a drawer, the world waits the way she left it, smaller than true.