The Cartographer's Insomnia

She traces the coastline of a country that no longer exists — its borders dissolved into the sea before she was born, her pen following the negative space of what was once called home.

All maps are elegies. The legend admits nothing: symbols for swamp, for ruins, for ford, but no symbol for the way a road forgets its own direction.

The ink dries faster than she remembers. By morning the rivers have shifted into new channels, the cities have taken on names she doesn't recognize, the mountains lean a few degrees south.

She starts again at the edge of the paper, at the shore where the scale bar ends, where the compass rose has only three petals left, pointing toward versions of north she has not tried.