The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastline of a face from what the hands remember— the jaw's soft declension, the way light pooled in the hollow below the eye.

The pencil moves where certainty has already receded. She shades the dark with guesswork, fills the bays of expression with water she cannot name.

Every map is an argument with absence. The legend says: here, warmth. Here, the specific weight of a voice before it learned to leave rooms quietly.

She folds the paper once, twice, until the coastline meets itself and the face becomes a country she could only ever visit in the wrong season.

What remains is the act of drawing— the pressure of the nib against grain, the small insistence that something held its shape long enough to be worth losing.