The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning she folds and unfolds the map of a city that no longer exists, pressing her thumb into the crease where the river used to bend before they straightened it for commerce.

The streets have names she learned before she had words— Millbrook, the alley behind the chandler's shop, the square where pigeons curred in the eaves of the clocktower and the clocktower came down in a winter she was eight.

She draws coastlines from memory, knows the lie in them. Every shore she has charted has already moved. The ocean does not ask permission. The peninsula she loved has become an island.

What she maps is not the land but the going-back, that corridor of light between one breath and the next where her mother's kitchen still smells of cardamom, where no street has been erased, no building hollowed.

She rolls the map at dawn and sets it by the window. Outside, a city she half-recognizes idles in the grey. She will learn it too, its bones, its tender names— and one day fold it away inside some sleepless hour like this.