The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory again— the inlet where the ferry used to run, the headland that fell into the sea before anyone thought to mark it.

Her pen finds the old road by feel, the one that curved around the orchard before the orchard was a parking lot. She labels it: *here, once, apples.*

Outside, the city breathes its shallow breath. A taxi turns a corner she has mapped a hundred times, wearing the street down to something thinner than the paper.

What she wants is a map of forgetting— where the fog settled permanently, which rivers reversed without announcement, the exact coordinates of the unremembered.

She folds the page before the ink dries. In the morning it will show only the places she has been. The rest: white space, the cartographer's confession.