The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coastlines from memory, her hand trembling over the vellum the way water trembles before it decides to fall.

Every inlet she had named for something lost: the bay of her mother's voice, the cape where her first certainty dissolved.

The mountains she left unnamed— those interior places where language stopped working and she had kept walking anyway.

At the margins she wrote notes to herself: *here be the years you cannot find*, *here be the man you almost became*, *here be the morning that turned inside out*.

When she died they found the map pressed flat under her mattress, the coastlines worn thin where she had traced them most— all those returning hands, all that faithful return.