The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory, the harbor where she slept one summer in a boat that smelled of salt and old rope, the way the tide came in like something decided.

Her pen moves the way forgetting does— sure at first, then branching into guesses, the road becoming three roads, the village she loved becoming a village-shaped doubt.

By four in the morning the map is crowded with what the place might have been, margins full of warnings she keeps revising: here the sea deepens without announcement.

She folds it wrong, the creases crossing towns, mountains pressed against their own foothills. Outside, the actual world lies quiet, indifferent to her corrections.