The Cartographer of Lost Things

She keeps a ledger of small disappearances: the blue button from a coat outgrown by 1994, a single earring traded for the river's keeping, the second key to a door that no longer opens.

Each loss is plotted by its absence, the way astronomers map dark matter — by the tug it exerts on what remains. A drawer pulled out too quickly. A pocket turned, then turned again.

She does not believe in finding. She believes in the geography of being missed: how a hairpin on the floor of a borrowed car becomes a country, how a name unspoken for a year becomes a sea.

Tonight she adds her grandmother's voice to the index, beside the recipe nobody wrote down. The page is soft from handling. The ink is older than the hand that holds it. She closes the book.

Outside, the snow begins its slow erasure — generous, indiscriminate, and exact.