The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory again, the inlet where the heron stood still as a held breath, the sandbar that appeared at low tide like a secret kept by water.

Her hand moves without asking permission. The ink pools in the curve of a bay she visited once, in a summer that no longer belongs to anyone.

What the map cannot hold: the smell of low tide, the way time bent that afternoon, how a single hour can become a country you carry but cannot enter.

She labels the unnamed cove with a word in a language she invented, knowing that all maps are acts of grief— the land stays, the cartographer drifts, the legend fades.

Morning comes. The coastline is finished and wrong. She rolls it carefully, ties it with string, sets it beside the others she will never send.