The Cartographer's Last Map

She draws the coastline from memory now, the harbor where her father's boat once bled rust into green water. The hand knows what the eye has forgotten.

Peninsulas reach into a blank sea like sentences interrupted mid-thought— she fills them anyway, invents the depths, names the shallows after what she lost there.

The mountains are guesses, their contours soft as the edge of an old photograph. She does not erase them. A map that admits uncertainty is more honest than one that pretends the world holds still.

At the border she leaves the paper white. Not nothing— just the country she has not yet traveled back to, whose shape she cannot trust herself to draw.