Cartography of Forgetting

The map I drew of you has softened at the edges, rivers rerouting themselves toward coasts that no longer hold the names I gave them.

I remember the angle of your shoulder more than your face — the body keeps what the mind releases like a held breath.

Some mornings I find a word I meant to say to you still warm in my mouth, a stone worn smooth by all that silence after.

The cartographers say unmapped land does not disappear — it waits in the patience of its own existence.

I am still drawing. The coastline keeps receding just before the pencil lands, and I keep following it into the white.