The Cartographer of Small Hours

At three a.m. the radiator speaks its dialect of pipes and patience, and I am awake again, charting the soft topography of the ceiling.

Somewhere a neighbor turns in sleep, the floorboards swell with their slow tide. I trace the cracked plaster like a coastline, each fissure a country I once meant to visit, each shadow a harbor I forgot to leave.

The streetlight pours through the blind in long pale ribbons, measuring nothing. A moth keeps trying to translate the glass into something it can pass through.

I think of my mother's hands at the sink, the way she rinsed the same blue cup for what seemed like years, humming a song whose words she'd stopped remembering.

Dawn arrives without ceremony, gray as the inside of a shell. The kettle wakes, the world resumes its weight, and I fold the night away like a map I will need again, and soon.