The Cartographer's Insomnia

She keeps redrawing the coastline where the sea ate the cliff in her childhood— each version slightly truer, slightly wrong, the pencil wearing down to nothing.

Memory is a cartographer who drinks. The harbors drift. The lighthouse moves three inches south each year toward somewhere she hasn't named yet.

At 3 a.m. the old country rises out of its own erasure— cobblestones that smelled of rain and cabbage, a particular slant of November sun no latitude can hold.

She folds the map along its creases, the paper soft now as a worn hem. What she cannot locate she marks unknown, and the unknown is half the world.