Cartography of the Unmade Bed

The sheets still hold the shape of you, a coastline of warmth pressed into cotton, the pillow keeping its fist-sized dent like wet clay that forgot to dry.

I learn the topography by touch— where the blanket folded toward morning, where the cold came in first, mapping the hours neither of us was sleeping.

A cartographer would mark this: here, the valley between shoulder blades; here, the delta where two bodies stopped touching and became themselves again.

By noon it's smoothed, the evidence pressed flat, the continent dissolved. I pull the sheets taut at the corners the way one closes a parenthesis.

But the room still tilts toward where you were, the whole geometry of it adjusting, like a sentence that has lost its subject and still leans.