Cartography of Forgetting

The map of you is losing its coastlines— first the harbor where you kept your silences, then the road that ran through the middle of everything.

I try to hold the city in my hands but the streets keep sliding into each other, a palimpsest of streets, then just the rain.

There are cities that exist only in the leaving. You walk through them and your footsteps ring like a coin on marble—once, then nothing.

I have drawn your face from memory so many times the paper has grown soft, the lines blurred into something almost beautiful, almost true.

What remains is not forgetting— it is the shape that forgetting makes when it finishes its long, quiet work.