The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines last, where water keeps rewriting what the land intended, the shore a daily argument between staying and release.

Her pen moves inward, tracing roads that no longer go anywhere particular— towns renamed, rivers rerouted by the hands of men who believed geography was theirs to correct.

In the legend: a symbol for what was almost said. Another for the path taken home at dusk when the key still fit, when someone stood behind the window watching for you.

She shades the mountains slowly. They are the same mountains. They have always been the same mountains, indifferent to what happened in the valleys below.

The map is nearly done now. She folds it along the creases she knows by heart, slips it somewhere safe— a drawer that holds the shapes of things before they became their absence.