The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning the cartographer spreads her old maps across the kitchen table, tracing coastlines that no longer hold their shape, the sea having eaten what was once named land.

She knows every border is a wound dressed in ink and ceremony. The mountain range her grandfather drew by hand has shifted half a degree since his death — enough to make a stranger of a homeland.

Outside, the city hums its low electric hymn. She marks a city that will flood by fifty years, presses her thumb against the blue as if warmth could argue with the water.

The legend says: here be certainty. She crosses it out. In the margin she writes the word for grief in a language no one speaks anymore, then closes the atlas like a door.