The Cartographer's Last Shore

She drew the coastlines from memory, each inlet named for something she had lost— the bay where her father's voice went thin, the cape that smelled of cedar and old rope.

The pen moved where the water moved, tracing the soft erasure of a shore that shifts between the tides, never the same twice under the same gray light.

What the map could not hold was the sound of boots on wet rock, the way the fog arrived before the cold, how she had once believed in fixed things.

She folded it at last along a crease that divided her younger self from this one, and set it on the window where the sea pressed its pale face against the glass.

Nothing she drew was wrong. Nothing was the place she meant.