The Cartographer of Small Hours

She maps the rooms by what the light forgets— the corner where the lamp has never reached, the drawer that swells in August, seals itself.

Each night she traces what remains uncharted: the weight of wool coats in the hall, the smell of something almost boiling over, the particular silence that follows a name.

Her instruments are not reliable. The compass tilts toward the kitchen at dusk. The legend keeps rewriting its own terms. Still she marks the distances— how far from the window to where he used to stand.

By morning the map is a different country, borders drawn in ink that bleeds at the edges. She folds it anyway. She carries it. Some territories only exist because you keep returning.