The Cartographer's Insomnia

She traces coastlines onto vellum by the light of a single candle, all the shores she has never touched rendered faithful in lampblack ink.

The sea does not know it has been drawn. It continues its unrecorded swallowing, eating the edges of what she claims, moving the boundaries while she sleeps.

She does not sleep. Instead she adds rivers that narrowed in drought, villages that swallowed their own names, a mountain range invented by the eye that still fills the chest with vertigo.

What is a map but a letter to someone who cannot be there— here is the hill where the grass bends east, here is the silence shaped like water, here is where I stood and looked back.

By morning the candle is a black stump. The map is finished. The land it describes has already changed the way a face changes between the time you look and the time you look again.