The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world through her father's hands, the way they traced coastlines before sleep, fingers settling into bays like water.

Every map he made was also a confession— here the river bends where his father drowned, here the valley where her mother's name still hangs in the cold morning air.

She carries the rolled tubes of paper like relics, like bones, unspooling them in apartments where the furniture hasn't learned her yet.

At forty she draws her own: cities marked not by population but by which cafés she wept in, which bridges she crossed twice, reluctant, both times.

The legend reads: distance is not absence. The scale is one to one.