The Cartographer's Insomnia

The atlas falls open to a country I have never visited but recognize— its rivers drawn in the same blue as the veins inside my wrist.

Three in the morning and the house settles into its own geography, each creak a coordinate, each shadow a province I keep trying to name.

I trace the coastline of the blanket's edge where sleep should be, that foreign shore where the body finally agrees to forget its own coordinates.

Somewhere a cartographer is erasing a mountain range that no longer exists, replacing it with the pale green of what the land became without us.

I fold the map along its well-worn seams, press my thumb into the crease where two hemispheres meet— that thin ridge where dawn begins.