The Cartographer of Forgetting

She drew the rivers first, their bends exact as childhood, every oxbow a year she could still name.

Then the roads narrowed. The village where her mother hung linen in the cold became a smudge, became a color, became the word for white.

She kept working. Drew the coastline from feel, the way a tongue finds the place a tooth was. The harbor still held its shape— water remembers pressure.

By the end the map showed a country she had never visited, full of mountains no one climbs, borders drawn in a language that translates only as almost.

She folded it anyway, careful along the creases. Pressed it flat. Filed it where the others were.