The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world through her father's hands— how a river bends not by accident but because stone refuses, and water relents.

He traced coastlines on her palm before sleep, his fingernail a promontory, her lifeline the road no map had named.

When he died, she inherited his atlases, pages foxed with the smell of his study, margins crowded with his second thoughts. She read them as a geologist reads strata— each correction a small collapse of certainty.

Now she makes her own maps, deliberate and full of omissions. She draws only what she has touched with her own body: the cold shoulder of a lake at dusk, the particular silence of a border town.

What she cannot bear to render she marks with a blank white square— not unknown, not unnamed, only too known for any line to hold.