What the Cartographer Left Out

The old map folded wrong at the river, its crease erasing the village where my grandmother learned to swim. I hold it up to the window light and see nothing but paper.

Some territories resist the pen — the hour before dawn when a house becomes only its sounds, the specific gravity of a name no longer called across a yard.

The cartographer knew what he drew. He also knew what he left as white: not emptiness but the confession that measurement stops at the edge of the known.

I have my own blank margins. The road I never walked back down. The conversation that ended while both of us were still speaking, our words arriving after we'd already gone.

What the map cannot hold holds us instead — we carry the unmapped countries the way hands carry cold water: briefly, and spilling.