The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws coastlines that no longer hold, the peninsula dissolved before the ink dried, a harbor mouth closed over by sediment and years.

Her legends explain what isn't there: the symbol for a city that burned, the hatching for a language no one speaks, the blue that means the river changed its mind.

The blank spaces are the honest parts— she leaves them wide and pale as morning, refuses to fill them with the old names just because she once knew them.

Somewhere a road still runs between two towns that haven't faced each other in decades. She traces it anyway, her hand steady over the vanished bridge.

What survives is not the land but the motion of looking— the way the hand learns the shape of a shore and keeps that shape long after the water recedes.