The Cartographer's Last Map

She drew the coast from memory, the shoreline trembling where her hand had once been certain— every bay a forgetting, every headland a name she almost kept.

The legend listed what the symbols meant: a cross for harbor, a star for town, a small blank circle for the place where someone loved her and then left.

She inked the rivers last, knowing they moved faster than the pen, that by the time the paper dried some channel would have shifted, redrawn itself in silence through the dark.

And when she folded it— the mountain range pressed against the sea, the river folded into cloud— she understood that maps are only grief made flat and legible.

She sealed it in a tube of brass and carried it until she couldn't, then set it on the water, watched it find the current, the current find the open.