The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in her father's handwriting— coastlines looped like cursive, mountains shaded in the gray of his fatigue. Every border was a decision someone made before she was born.

At seven she asked why the rivers didn't match the ones outside the window. He said: maps are arguments, not answers. She didn't understand until much later when she tried to draw her own grief and kept erasing the edges.

Now she draws cities from memory, the ones she's lived in layered transparent over one another— a palimpsest of wrong turns and good coffee, of who she was when she still trusted her compass.

There are places she returns to only in ink. She gives them coordinates that don't exist, plants them in the white space cartographers once filled with sea monsters— here be the things I cannot visit twice.