The Cartographer of Lost Things

She keeps a ledger of vanishings: the blue button from a wool coat, a sister's laugh inside a kitchen, the precise weight of her father's hand when it still believed in her.

Some afternoons she walks the inventory like a country with weather of its own, naming each absence twice— once for what it was, once for the shape it left.

The dog that learned her name and forgot it. The bicycle abandoned to a hedge. A summer that arrived without permission and left the back door open behind it.

She does not mourn so much as measure, laying her tape across the dark, finding the rooms still legible, the bones of the house still humming beneath new paint, new tenants, new rain.

At night she folds the map small enough to fit beneath her tongue, so that even sleep has a country and the dead, somewhere, have addresses to which the wind keeps writing.