What the Cartographer Left Out

The map shows the road but not the mud that held your boot three seconds longer than expected, not the smell of rain on warm asphalt or the way the hill tilted your whole childhood sideways into evening.

There is a town I keep returning to in sleep — its name worn smooth by use, its streets arranged the way grief arranges itself: familiar enough to walk without looking, strange enough to lose you anyway.

The cartographer marks rivers where rivers are. She does not mark the bridge we stood on arguing, the current that kept moving under our silence, carrying small branches toward the sea as if it had somewhere important to be.

What I want is a map of the unmappable — the field my grandmother crossed at dusk carrying something she never named, the place where the road bends and you see, for a moment, where you are going.