The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws coastlines from what she remembers— the particular drag of salt air through a window, the way a harbor mouth goes quiet before dawn.

Her pen finds no continent it hasn't already ruined with precision. She names the bays for things that left without announcement: the Bay of Late Afternoon, the Strait of What You Meant to Say.

Outside, the city hums its grid of amber lights, each one a fixed coordinate, a certainty she cannot replicate on paper— the world too full of itself to be charted.

She folds the map along its failures, the creases becoming rivers, the tears becoming gaps where mountains slip into the legend and stay there, unnamed, at the edge of the known.