What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps marked the rivers wrong— each bend a guess, each confluence a hope penciled in by someone who had never stood where the water argued with itself.

Still we folded them at the creases, trusted the thin blue lines more than our boots, and learned the country the way children learn grief: by arriving somewhere we did not expect.

There is a village my grandmother named that no road leads to anymore. I have driven through the approximate coordinates and found only light pouring through a gap in the trees, the way it does when something has been cleared.

Distance is not absence. The cartographer left blank the spaces she could not measure, and we filled them with our own going— with the smell of turned earth after rain, with the hour a door opened and did not close.

What remains is not on any map. It is the word she used for the particular dusk of late August, untranslatable, worn smooth by the mouths of everyone who has since forgotten how to say it.