The Cartographer's Grief

She mapped every room of him — the draughty corridor of his silences, the small country behind his left eye where weather gathered without warning.

Now the legend has come undone. North is still north, but points to somewhere she no longer recognizes, a coast that keeps revising its own edge.

She draws the absence anyway, hatchings for the places she can't return to, elevation lines around the hollow that used to be an ordinary Tuesday.

The ink dries at a different rate in grief — slower, she thinks, because the hand pauses above the paper the way you pause before a name you're no longer sure you're allowed to say.