The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastlines from memory, her hand tracing what the tide had swallowed— the harbor where her father taught her knots, the jetty that leaned into the sea like a prayer.

The ink ran blue where the water had been, green for the hills she was no longer certain of, a trembling X where the house once stood before the storm decided otherwise.

Maps lie in the kindest way: they flatten everything to what persists, omit the season the fig tree split, the summer the well ran to chalk and silence.

She folded the page along its old creases, the mountains collapsing neatly into ocean, the town fitting itself inside her palm— a world made portable, made almost bearable.

What we cannot return to we make small enough to carry. She tucked it into her coat and walked into the unmapped morning.