The Cartographer's Insomnia

She maps the rooms she can no longer enter— the kitchen where her grandmother stood thin as paper against the window light, folding dough with hands that knew the exact weight of silence.

The hallway measured in footsteps, eleven from door to door, the loose board third from the left that announced every leaving, every return.

Now she draws the coastlines of those years from memory, which is to say from erosion— whole continents of detail worn to suggestion.

The ink dries wrong. The distances keep shifting. She labels the blank spaces with words that cartographers once used for what they could not see: *here be*.