Cartography of the Unremembered

The map my grandmother kept had no roads, only rivers drawn in pencil so faint they looked like veins drained of meaning. She knew by pressure where the water ran.

I have been in that country once— the one before language, where the body holds what the mind forgets: the weight of a hand, the particular dark of a closed room.

Now I draw backward from sensation. Wet clay. Pine resin. A door that swelled in August and would not close. Small facts that survive the flood while the names of streets wash out.

What we remember is not the thing itself but the turning toward it— a repeated gesture, a notch worn in the wood of reaching back. The groove is all that's left.