The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coast from memory, the inlet where the boats no longer anchor, the lighthouse reduced to its own shadow.

Every map is an elegy. She knows this now, pressing the nib into paper thin as a held breath— the land keeps migrating south.

Her father's village is nine centimeters from where it stood when she was eight. The river has revised itself. She corrects the river, then corrects herself.

By morning she has charted everything: the road that ends where the orchard used to begin, the names of streets no one walks anymore, the precise coordinates of forgetting.

She folds it once, along the fault line of his death, and places it with the others— a drawer full of countries that exist only in her hands.