What the Maps Don't Show

There's a place I walked once between seasons, where the creek was trying to remember its old course— the banks heavy with that particular rot that smells like beginning. A child called my name from somewhere I couldn't see.

I've searched for it on satellite images, in the names of roads renamed, in the faces of trees now thick enough to hide the sky. The coordinates slip like water. What we remember is never where we left it.

The body knows. Some mornings my feet move as if following a map I've forgotten I'm reading— down a street that changed its name, toward a house that might have been blue or might have been the quality of light falling through leaves that existed before I learned to doubt the accuracy of my own remembering.

Even now, I'm losing the exact shade of that light.