Cartography of Forgetting

There are maps that only exist in the hands that once drew them — the crease of a river you crossed at dusk, the legend dissolving before anyone could read it.

My grandmother's kitchen smelled of caraway and something older, nameless, a country now only an outline where the borders were redrawn and the villages renamed.

She held the old names the way you hold water, feeling the pressure of it against your cupped palms, sure it will leave.

I drive past fields she never saw and call them by sounds I half-remember, practicing the syllables like pressing a finger into wet clay — certain the impression will fill.