The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines of what she no longer knows— rough strokes where a grandmother's voice used to gather in the chest like tide.

The map has edges that keep moving. Streets that were certain yesterday curve now into the unmapped pale, their names dissolving like sugar in rain.

She works in the small hours, pressing the nib hard as if pressure could fix the known world in place, could hold the contours of a face before they soften into general light.

Every map is an argument against time— and time, she has learned, does not argue back. It simply waits at the edge of the parchment where the markings stop.