What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps show the river as a clean blue line, decisive, but they never drew the year it flooded and took the Brennan barn with it, boards spinning like slow hands.

My grandmother kept a map of her village folded into the size of a secret. Streets that no longer exist were still there in her telling, held open by the pressure of her thumb.

Every cartographer is making an argument about what deserves to last. The hills stay. The borders stay. The names of those who crossed them dissolve like chalk in rain.

I've tried to map this place I grew up in but the landmarks keep shifting — the elm they cut down, the diner that became a pharmacy, then nothing. Memory insists on its own coordinates.

So I leave the page mostly white, which is not absence but potential, the way a field before the snow holds all its futures quietly beneath itself.