The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the rivers first, always — the way they argued with the land, insisting on their own grammar.

Every coastline she rendered was already wrong by the time the ink dried, the sea leaning into it like a slow forgetting.

She left the mountains unnamed. Whoever finds this, she thought, will need room to call them something new, to arrive and feel the word rise before language has a chance to harden.

In the margins she wrote the names of winds she had no symbol for — the one that comes before grief, the one that smells of iron and childhood, the one that arrives only once.

The last sheet stayed blank. Not unfinished — she'd learned the difference. Some territories resist the hand and remain themselves, luminous and uncharted, exactly as they must be.