The Cartographer's Last Map

She draws coastlines from memory now, the ink pooling where the harbor used to curve, her hand tracing what the water taught her before the water changed its mind.

Every map is a letter to the past. She knows this. She draws anyway— the mountain that eroded into a meadow, the village that became a lake, the road that grew into forest.

What she records is not the land but the mind's insistence on the land: that particular blue she mixed for the river the summer her daughter first said her name and the river was still there to witness it.

The edges of her maps always fray where certainty ends and longing begins. She leaves them unfinished on purpose, a border that invites the hand of whoever comes next.