The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines after they have moved, charting the shore of last Tuesday with ink that smells of iron and burnt paper. Every map is already wrong by the time she folds it.

The river she grew up beside has shifted west by half a breath, and the willow she kissed under now stands in someone else's version of that field. She notes the discrepancy. Does not correct it.

Distance is not the enemy of memory— distance is how memory survives, the way a sound heard faint across water becomes more itself than the bell that struck it.

She marks the place where her father stood with a small circle, no name, the cartographer's symbol for a spring that may or may not still be running below the ground.