The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines of what she can still hold — her mother's hands, the smell of cedar smoke, a window whose sill was cold in February. The rest she marks with hatching, the cartographer's sign for unexplored terrain.

Every year the unmapped regions grow. Cities she loved dissolve into their names alone, then into a feeling she can't locate, a warmth with no address, a door without a house around it.

She does not mourn the way you'd expect. She adds new coastlines at the edge of the known world: the particular green of this morning's light, the way her granddaughter mispronounces river, bright as a coin just minted.

The map was never meant to hold everything, she tells herself, folding it along creases worn soft as skin. It was only ever a way of moving through the world with something warm under the hand.