The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning she unfolds the old atlas, pressing flat the creases where whole coastlines have gone soft with forgetting.

She knows the cities by their roads outward — the way a place reveals itself only in the direction it lets you leave.

She has drawn rivers that no longer run, named mountains for what she felt climbing them, not what anyone else agreed to call them.

The legend is wrong. The scale has never accounted for the weight of standing somewhere and knowing you will go.

By morning she refolds it wrong — the Gulf misaligned, a border tucked inside a sea — and trusts the map is better now for it.