The Cartographer of Forgetting

She keeps the old maps because they name rivers that have changed their courses, towns that burned and left only a word hovering over empty fields.

To hold a map of 1943 is to hold a country that believed in itself, that had not yet learned what it would lose by morning.

She traces a road with her finger and travels nowhere, arrives at a crossroads no longer shaped like that.

The legend says: marsh, orchard, mill. She has stood in all those places. Now they are parking lots, or worse, still fields, still silent, still.

She does not fold the maps back along their creases. She leaves them open on the table the way you leave a door open for something you are no longer sure is coming.