The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastlines from recall, the bays her grandmother's hands made pressing dough against the rim of a bowl. Every inlet is a misremembering that becomes more true than the truth.

At three in the morning the pencil moves without her. The room knows what her hands are looking for— the small harbor where the ferry used to disappear into fog.

She names the unnamed shoals after hours: the Pale Before Dawn, the Long Wait, the Almost. Her legends fill the margins with warnings no ship will ever need to heed.

By daylight she folds it all away. Someone else will inherit this map, mistake it for the world, and sail straight into her longing believing it is land.