What the Cartographer Forgot

The old cartographer drew the river twice— once where it ran in spring, silver and insistent, once where he remembered it, years warmer, bending south through a field no longer there.

Both lines were true. Neither was the river. He understood this late, when the ink had dried and the paper curled at its edges like a question.

There are places that exist only in the telling: the valley your grandmother named for a cousin who died before the maps were made, the shortcut that was a detour was a ritual.

We navigate by what we loved first. The compass points to somewhere that may have already moved.

When I try to find the house I grew up in, the street arranges itself around a child's proportion— doorframes taller, the distance to school longer, the dark between the lamp-posts a country I once knew by heart.