What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old maps folded at the creases where fingers traced the coast too many times, wearing the paper to a soft translucence like skin over a healed wound.

He drew mountains by their shadows, not their height — the dark shapes pooling in valleys at four in the afternoon, the specific grief of a ridge at dusk.

Some rivers he left without names. Not from forgetting, but because a name closes something off, puts a frame around the moving water.

She found the maps after he died, unrolled them on the kitchen table and saw, in the blank spaces, every place he'd meant to come back to.

Now she traces those silences with one finger, moving slowly the way water finds its level — learning the shape of what he couldn't say.