Cartography of Forgetting

The map was wrong before we finished drawing it— rivers already shifting their mouths, the mountain we named after your silence worn to a suggestion of itself.

We walked the coastline backwards once, thinking we could rewind the tide into something we recognized. The salt stayed. The names dissolved.

There is a country between sleeping and waking where every door opens onto the last room you ever shared with someone you loved— the furniture rearranged by grief, the light coming from no visible window.

I keep the old atlas anyway, its margins full of cities we agreed to visit later. Later is its own cartography now, a place that keeps receding as you walk toward it.

What we mapped was not the land but the wanting of it— those thin pencil lines trembling between where we stood and where we believed we might arrive.