Cartography of Forgetting

The mind erases coastlines first — the salt smell of a particular summer, the exact angle of a doorway you walked through a thousand times and cannot now recall.

What remains are objects without rooms: a blue cup, a key that opens nothing you still own, your grandmother's voice stripped of her face.

The cartographers say all maps are already out of date the moment the ink dries — rivers shift, borders dissolve, whole cities vanish into prairie.

Memory works the same: faithful only to its own erosion, drawing the territory as it was and calling the mismatch the present.