The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastline from memory, tracing where the water had learned to rest against the land, the small surrenders of the tide.

The peninsula she'd loved became a finger pointing into nothing she could name— only the blue ink spreading where certainty used to be.

Her father's village she placed too far south, by half a day's walk, the way grief always moves things slightly from where you left them.

At the edges of the paper she wrote: here the roads end and the names for places thin— not warning, just observation, the cartographer's honest notation.

She folded it once and did not unfold it again. Some maps are made for the making, not the arriving.