The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastline by its absences— where the pier once angled into fog, a white gap, the paper breathing.

The harbor she knew by its smell of diesel and brine does not appear. She leaves it as open water, which is perhaps what harbors always were.

Her pencil hesitates at the hill where the oak stood before the storm. She renders it as altitude only, a contour line curving around nothing, faithful to the shape of a wound.

In the legend she writes: dotted lines indicate places I have not returned to. Solid lines are what remains. The map is mostly dotted now, a constellation of departure.

Still she works at the kitchen table, the lamp making a small country of light. She does not know what she is charting until the pen lifts and she sees it— not what was lost, but that she remembers the losing, which is its own kind of land.