What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps called it terra incognita — not the unknown, but the unwritten, the place where the surveyor's hand trembled and set down his pen.

My grandmother kept a drawer of unsent letters. I found them after, still sealed, each envelope addressed to someone the world had already swallowed. The ink had bled through the paper like watercolor rain.

There are coastlines that exist only in the body: the exact weight of a door you'll never push open again, the smell of a kitchen at four in the afternoon when the light came through in sheets and no one was watching it but you.

What the cartographer left out was this: that every map is also a forgetting, a decision about which rivers matter, which silences to fold into the white.

She is somewhere still, I think, in the part of the map they left blank — not lost, only unlabeled, waiting for a name no one has made yet.