The Cartographer's Inheritance

She left me her maps — all coastlines wrong by twenty years, harbors renamed, the ink of rivers faded to suggestion.

I trace with my finger where she placed a mountain in the shape of a held breath, the valley she labeled only *home*.

Some borders she drew freehand, no ruler, no survey — just the conviction of having stood there, of having belonged.

Now I inherit the errors and the love alike, her careful notation of depths unknown, the blank margins where she stopped and did not write what she saw next.

I fold the maps back wrong, crease over crease, until the world she made fits in my coat pocket, and I carry her geography through a country she never charted.