Cartography of Borrowed Light

I open the window and the day leans in, carrying a faint smell of copper and rain. Every droplet is a lens, a small blue witness making a city of the air.

On the table, a torn receipt becomes a shoreline. I trace it with a finger and feel the grain like dunes that remember a vanished sea, like a map drawn by the tide’s brief hand.

Somewhere a train folds its metal wings, the sound of it flaring, then cooling. In the tracks of my palm, a pale atlas forms— roads to the rooms we walked through once.

By evening, light is borrowed from the pavement. It pools in my cup, it sways in the curtain’s hem. I drink and the room goes amber, slow and wide, a country that exists only while I breathe.