What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named the unnamed sea after a man who never crossed it. His handwriting trembled at the edges, where the ink ran out before the land did.

I have done the same with you— drawn the coast from memory, filled the blank interior with the shapes of what I feared, labeled the mountains after my own doubts.

Every revision is an erasure. The town we stood in is still there, but I have smoothed the street corners, widened the river by a wish, moved the church one block closer to the water.

Now the legend has no symbol for the exact way the light fell through that particular café window. I mark it *terra incognita* and sail around it every time.