The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory, her pen tracing where the water argued with stone, each inlet a small surrender, each cliff a word she couldn't say aloud.

By morning the map is wrong. The sea has moved again, imperceptibly, the way grief shifts your furniture at night so you bruise yourself on what you thought you knew.

She pins the old charts over the new ones, layers of the same shore in different light— one summer the dunes stood taller, one winter the harbor mouth narrowed to a fist.

What she wants is not accuracy. She wants the version where the breakwater holds, where the lighthouse at the northern point still answers ships that no longer sail.

So she draws it anyway, the country of before, labeling its shores in a language no one needs, folding the whole thing small enough to keep in the pocket closest to her chest.