The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning she unfolds the map of a city she has never visited, tracing rivers with her thumb until the paper softens, until the streets blur into something like home.

The legend explains nothing useful — what color for grief, what symbol for the year a name stopped fitting like a coat left at the wrong party.

She draws coastlines from memory though she has never lived near the sea. Still, the hand knows: headland, inlet, the drag of tide against a shore that does not remember being touched.

By morning the map is full of rivers with no names, cities that exist only at their edges. She folds it wrong, the way maps always come back wrong, and sets it on the sill where the light won't find it.