The Cartographer of Lost Rooms

She drew the apartments she'd left behind on the backs of envelopes, on receipts, the kitchen of '94 with its yellow phone cord coiled like a sleeping animal under the sill.

Each doorway opened onto another doorway. The bathroom tile she once scrubbed with a toothbrush became the floor of a stranger's wedding. A window in Lisbon let in the light of Toledo.

She labeled nothing. The maps were for her hands, not her eyes — the way a pianist's fingers know the black keys without looking, the way grief finds the loose stair on its own.

At night she folded the papers into smaller papers, pocketed them, walked out into the rain that fell the same in every city, forgiving the architecture of her leaving.