The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the borders of what she no longer remembers— a coastline where the name of her grandmother's street ends in open water, a city that once smelled of cardamom now only a blank province she labels *here*.

The rivers on her map run backwards, toward the mountains that made them, as if origins are the one thing the mind insists on keeping.

There is a room she has sketched a hundred times and each time the window faces a different direction. What remains constant: the light, its quality of arriving from somewhere specific, its refusal to be elsewhere.

She folds the map along old creases, the paper thinning where it was touched most— the crossroads, the harbor, the field where something happened once in summer.

What she cannot recall she marks with small birds, their wings spread mid-flight, going nowhere, filling the white spaces with the honest grammar of motion.