Cartography of Forgetting

The river doesn't mourn the shape it wore last spring — it just moves, carrying silt from somewhere it no longer knows.

I drew maps of you in the dark, longitude of a shoulder, the small meridian below your ear. All of it accurate once, all of it already wrong.

What we call forgetting is only the land changing beneath the lines we drew — borders drifting, coastlines eating into themselves.

Some mornings I find the coordinates still saved somewhere in muscle, a gesture reaching toward a cup that isn't there — the body its own obsolete atlas.

And the river keeps its counsel, neither loyal nor faithless, shaping its new mouth around whatever the valley is willing to offer now.