What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps named every inlet but not the smell of low tide, not the way the mud held your boot one breath longer than expected.

She traced the coastline with a finger the way you read a scar— not for information but to feel the ridge of it, the year compressed into skin.

Some places exist only in the going back. The house still stands but the light has moved to a different corner of the afternoon, and the elm that made the yard a room is a pale stump the grass is slowly covering.

Memory is its own projection, the legend written in a hand that no longer matches yours— you have grown into different distances, measure everything now in hours, not miles.

What the map cannot show is the specific silence of a door that no one comes through anymore, the geography of absence, which has no scale.