What the Cartographer Left Out

The old maps showed only rivers and the names of towns already gone, not the way the light fell late in summer through a gap in the ridge like a word you keep almost remembering.

She folded the paper along its worn creases until the valley disappeared into itself, the contour lines pressed together like hands, like years.

Everything that mattered was unmarked: the field where the grass stood silver after rain, the fence post rotted through at the base, the place you stopped walking and didn't say why.

A cartographer measures what can be measured. The rest becomes white space, which is not emptiness but the opposite— all the world that wouldn't hold still.