What the Cartographer Leaves Out

The map does not show the smell of rain on hot asphalt, or how the elm on Vrbová Street leans toward the bakery window as though it too is hungry.

It shows the bridge but not the pigeons roosting in its steel ribs, not the woman who stops there every Thursday to look at water and decide.

Somewhere between the legend and the edge is where I lived— a blue dot that kept moving, a name that roads couldn't hold.

The cartographer draws borders with conviction as if lines know something about belonging. But the river doesn't read the map. It simply goes where the land allows.

What we love has no scale bar. Distance isn't measured in kilometers but in how long it takes to stop expecting a place to call back.