The Cartographer's Grief

She kept redrawing the coastline as if the sea would eventually hold still, as if grief were a matter of scale.

The old maps named every cape for saints, each inlet a wound the water opened slowly— she understood this, finally, in the year she stopped correcting them.

Some places exist only in the going back. The house returns each time she closes her eyes: the linden tree, the cracked front step, the smell of rain on warm concrete like a question she forgot to ask.

She folds the paper along its creases, the coastline doubling over itself, the saints briefly touching their own mouths.