Cartography of Forgetting

The old maps named the ocean's blank places with creatures no one had seen— a way of saying: here the known ends, here the world becomes hypothesis.

You do the same with certain years, filling gaps with invented weather, a mother's face assembled from a photograph rather than the moment she stood in light.

Memory is not a room you return to but a room that returns to you differently— smaller each time, the window moved, the smell of bread replaced with something you can't name but recognize as absence.

What the mind releases does not vanish. It becomes the pressure behind the sternum when a stranger hums a song you thought you had forgotten,

and for a moment the whole lost country rises like land from fog, then subsides again, patient, waiting for the next mistake.