What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

The old maps end where the ink ran dry— a peninsula suspended mid-gesture, coastline trailing off like a thought the cartographer decided not to finish.

Someone once loved that uncharted bay. They waded in with the sun behind them, their shadow stretching long across the shallows, reaching the deep before they did.

We name what we intend to return to. The rest we let remain the way a drawer holds a key for a door no longer standing.

Now the peninsula exists only in the gap between surveys— real in the way that waiting is real, in the way that held breath is a kind of weather.

I press my finger to the blank space. Beneath the white, the water still moves. Beneath the water, something remembers the shape of the shore.