The Cartographer's Last Survey

She drew the coastlines from memory now, her hands moving over paper the way water moves over stone — smoothing, wearing thin the places where the truth used to be sharp.

The harbor she loved had silted in by autumn. The lighthouse stood where she remembered but the keeper was different, his window dark at the hour it always burned for her.

Still she made the maps. Marked the tidal pools by their old names. Let the inlet stay wide even after she'd heard it had been dredged, filled, turned into a parking lot for tourists.

A map is also a record of longing — what we call accurate is often what we cannot bring ourselves to change, the lines of passage we keep drawing so the world stays crossable.

She folded the last sheet along its fault lines, the paper splitting soft as she pressed the crease. Somewhere a coast was shifting. She did not pick up the pencil to correct it.