What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

In the drawer beneath the window she kept maps of places she had never been, the fold-lines worn white as old scars, coastlines penciled in someone else's hand.

She told me once that blank space is not absence but refusal— the cartographer's honest admission that some country resists being known.

I think of her now when I drive through fog, the road narrowing to a throat, headlights swallowed before they reach anything solid. There is no shame in stopping. There is no shame in naming it: I do not know what comes next.

At the edge of the map the dragons lived, patient and enormous, not waiting to devour but simply occupying what was left when certainty ran out.

She is gone now. The drawer is mine. I trace the unnamed inlets with one finger, feeling the slight groove of someone's careful line, and understand at last that to leave a thing blank is its own kind of love.