The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastline from the inside out, measuring distance by the weight of salt left behind when water retreats.

The harbor where her father kept his boat has folded into contour lines now, a topography of what she means when she says fine.

She works in pencil, always pencil, because the sea keeps revising itself and she has learned not to argue with erasure.

Some mornings the fog comes in so thick it swallows the lighthouse whole, and she marks that too — not as absence but as a different kind of presence.

What she calls forgetting the map calls terra incognita. What she calls loss the paper holds in white space, patient as unbegun rain.