The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the borders of what she no longer knows— the province of her grandmother's hands, the river that divided one year from the next.

Each erasure is its own cartography. A village disappears between two versions of the map, and the roads that led there remain, going nowhere in particular.

She measures distance in the gaps: between a name and its face, between the sound of rain on a tin roof and the house that held it.

What she keeps is not the thing itself but the shape the thing has left— an outline, a hollow, a country that was always disappearing even while she lived inside it.