What the Cartographer Left Out

She drew the river twice, once where it runs and once where it used to run, the old bed still holding its shape in the grass.

The town she labeled in a hand that tilted slightly left, as if she were correcting something the land had said wrong.

At the margins she wrote nothing — no legend for the dark that pools beneath the bridge at four a.m., no scale for how far a voice carries across water when no one is awake to hear it.

I have walked the edges of her map with my finger, following roads that end before they reach the coast, the sea left entirely to the imagination, blue and enormous and unnamed.

She kept the failures. Every erased line still shows through, a palimpsest of where she thought the mountain was before she climbed it and found it somewhere else.