What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old maps end at the edge of water, where the cartographer's pen lifted mid-stroke and the coast becomes conjecture— a dotted line trailing into nothing like a sentence that forgot itself.

She told me once that forgetting is just another kind of making room, the way a river reroutes after the flood and the old channel fills with silt and reeds, still visible from above, if you know to look.

I have been walking her absence the way you walk a city you once lived in: half-familiar, half-invented, every alley carrying the ghost of a conversation we almost had.

The cartographer put sea monsters there, in the unmapped places. Not from fear, but to say: something lives in what I cannot name. Something vast. Something still moving.