The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the rivers from memory, their mouths open toward a sea she has only heard described in letters that arrived damp, illegible at the edges.

The lamp bends low over the table. She fills in the mountains with crosshatching, each stroke a small correction of something she got wrong the first time.

Borders are the hardest. They want to be rivers, or ridgelines, or the place where the grass changes color without anyone deciding it should.

By three in the morning the coastline curves like a question she keeps returning to— not the name of the place, but whether the place remembers being named.

She folds the map before the ink dries. In the morning she will open it to find the wet lines pressed together, the mountains walking into the sea.