The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the rivers from memory, blue ink spreading where the water no longer runs. Her hand knows the bend before the mind does.

Every coastline is an argument with what was. The pencil skips where the ferry dock stood — some absences are load-bearing.

She traces the road they drove once in August, the radio half-broken, singing through the static like something trying to stay.

The map fills. She works by lamplight into the particular dark that lives between midnight and the first birds.

When she is done she will fold it along creases that were never meant to hold — the way we carry the places we can no longer find.