Cartography of Leaving

The house holds the shape of you still — a dent in the sofa's armrest, the kitchen window left slightly open the way you always left it, trusting the rain to know when to stop.

I have been mapping the rooms you no longer occupy, measuring absence the way surveyors pace out land: deliberate, methodical, trying not to look at the sky.

Your coat on the hook is a peninsula. The half-finished book, face-down, a bay. I navigate these shores at dusk when the light makes everything look like something you almost said.

By morning the geography shifts. I forget which shelf held your glasses, which drawer your letters. The house is still learning to be a different country.