The Cartographer's Inheritance

My grandmother kept her country in a drawer — folded thin as onion skin, creased along rivers she had crossed by ferry, by foot, by the weight of leaving.

I unfolded it once on the kitchen table. The ink had bled where it was wet when she packed it, or wept over it, the borders already dissolving before the war made it official.

Now I carry only the shape of her hands smoothing that paper flat, the way she pressed each crease as if pressing it back into being — a country that lived in the touching.

The drawer is someone else's drawer. The map is a museum's map. But on certain mornings, when fog erases the hills past the window, I know exactly where I am.