The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory, every inlet a sentence she didn't finish, the peninsula a name she still can't say aloud.

The lamp bends over the paper like a concerned parent, casting her hands in amber, the ink blooming where she pauses too long.

Some territories refuse to be named. She marks them with a small ship tilting on the margin, the old signal for here the water does something we don't understand.

By four in the morning she has mapped every room of the house she grew up in, every window that faced the wrong direction, the garden that ended without ceremony at a chain-link fence.

She folds the map along a crease that does not exist in the paper. It holds. Some borders are only visible when you look away.