What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

She drew rivers where there were none, filling the blank interiors with blue thread, conjuring tributaries from the hope of rain.

The mountain ranges she sketched freehand lean slightly eastward, as though listening for something just beyond the paper's edge.

I have crossed those invented rivers. I have climbed what she called merely *range*, no name, just the fact of rising.

There are places that exist only because someone needed them to— needed a there to have come from, a shore to imagine returning to.

She is gone now. The atlas stays open on the table where she left it, the white spaces still white, still breathing.