Cartography of Forgetting

The river has no memory of the stones it wore to smoothness over centuries — it simply runs, carrying what it can, releasing what it must.

My grandmother's kitchen smelled of fennel and burnt sugar, a map I drew in my lungs before I knew what maps were for. Now the coordinates shift a little each year, some cardinal direction misplaced.

There are cities I have never visited that feel more real than this room — the idea of Lisbon at dusk, the weight of its light, a fiction I've assembled from other people's words.

What we call remembering is mostly invention: the mind laying railroad tracks into terrain that existed once and may exist again, differently.

I keep the fennel. I let the kitchen go. The river takes the rest, polishing each loss to something almost luminous, held a moment in the current.