The Cartographer's Last Survey

She measured distances in footsteps, drew rivers from the blue veins of her wrist, named every hill after the word she'd lost the morning her mother forgot her face.

The legend grew crowded with symbols no one else could read — a triangle for the place grief first sat down in her, a dotted line for roads she still walks in sleep.

At the edge of the parchment she left a margin of blank cream, not because the land ran out but because some country refuses to be charted.

Now the map is folded into quarters, creased so many times the rivers bleed through the mountains, the cities drift toward the sea. She keeps it in a coat she no longer wears.