The Cartographer's Last Shore

Here where the coastline refuses to hold its shape for longer than a tide, she draws what isn't there yet— the promontory that will rise when the sea forgets itself.

Her instruments are honest. The theodolite measures angles, not longing, not the way a cape curves like a question the water keeps answering wrong.

She has named the unnamed inlets after her silences: the long one between her mother's last breath and the birds resuming, the brief one after she said yes.

On the final sheet she leaves the edge deliberately ragged, a shoreline mid-becoming, because some coasts are still deciding what land they want to be.