The Cartographer of Lost Rooms

She drew the house from the inside out, each doorway a small confession, the kitchen still smelling of bay leaves and the radio that always sang two stations at once.

In the margins, she pencilled the cat who slept on the sun's traveling square, the chair her father leaned back in until the wood remembered him better than the photographs did.

Some rooms refused to be measured — the one with the blue wallpaper, where her brother practiced disappearing, where the light came in slantwise, forgiving everything it touched.

She labelled the staircase Tuesday, the hallway Almost, the window above the sink Here is where I learned to be alone without being lonely, which is its own kind of weather.

When the map was done, she folded it the way you fold a letter to someone you no longer write to — carefully, as if the creases were the only way home.