The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning she draws coastlines from memory, the pen tracing bays she has never stood in but knows the way a tongue knows the shape of a word before the mouth has learned it.

The lamplight makes an island of the desk. Outside, the city is a low hum, something mechanical forgetting itself, and she marks a river where no river is — only the blue need of one.

Every map is an argument with loss. The island she keeps returning to has no name in any atlas, just the particular weight of salt air her body still carries from a dream.

She folds the paper into morning. The coastlines shift, inaccurate and true, the way all remembered places press themselves into us and refuse to hold still.