The Cartographer's Last Season

She drew rivers where memory had pooled— thin blue lines for what she almost said, wide estuaries for the years that emptied quietly into the sea.

The mountains were her father's silhouette at dusk, still growing smaller in the rearview mirror of some summer she keeps misplacing in a drawer.

A city blooms at the center of the page where the coordinates refuse to hold still. She names it after the smell of rain on concrete, which has no translation.

At the margins, coastlines fray. What she cannot remember she leaves as blank— white as the space between a breath and the word that should have followed it.

She folds the map along the old creases, tucks it behind the radiator where warmth will soften its edges until the whole country forgets its name.