The Cartographer's Insomnia

He traces coastlines in the dark, his finger moving along the window's edge where rain has drawn its own uncertain borders.

Every map he ever made was wrong— not in the measurements, those were clean, but in the silence given to the inlets, the names withheld from smaller bays.

His wife sleeps with the confidence of someone who has never tried to fix a river in place. He envies her the way you envy a thing that does not know it's beautiful.

By four o'clock he has mapped the ceiling, labeled every crack: Old Sorrow, Passage Road, the gulf he cannot quite recall the shape of but recognizes every time the light shifts.

Morning will come the way it always does— indifferent, precise, carrying its own coordinates. He will fold himself into the day and leave no legend for whoever finds this.