The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning I redraw the coastline where you used to live, correcting the inlet I always got wrong — too wide, too welcoming.

The paper remembers nothing. I press hard enough to leave grooves in the sheet beneath, a ghost map of everywhere I've been certain.

Somewhere a real coast is shifting without my permission, sand losing itself to the dark water grain by grain, without record.

I fold the map along a crease that doesn't correspond to any road. The fold becomes the territory. I've been traveling it for years.