Cartography of Forgetting

The map we drew is wrong now — the river has moved three inches west since your father's hands traced it, and the village named for a saint no longer answers to that name.

I keep the old map anyway, its creases soft as skin, the pencil marks still legible where someone noted: here the road turns bad, here wolves were seen in winter.

What we call forgetting is just the land doing what it does — filling in the low places, letting the high ones go to wind, indifferent to what we thought we knew.

Still, I unfold it at the kitchen table and trace the route we never took, past the unmarked border, through the forest you described as darker than it had any right to be.