The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws coastlines from memory at 3 a.m., the shoreline of your shoulder blade, the delta where your collarbone divides. Her ink runs out before she reaches the soft country behind your ear.

Some geographies resist the pen. The mountain range of a held breath. The flood plain after an argument. She has folded and refolded this map until the creases are their own terrain.

The territory keeps shifting. What was farmland is now a city. What was a city has gone back under water, back under grass, back under the names she gave it once.

She works through the blue hour, correcting a river that no longer runs, erasing borders drawn by someone younger. The finished map will show a place that no one left will know how to find.