The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in contour lines, the way elevation becomes confession, how every hill is a held breath.

Her father drew coastlines that never existed— imagined ports with salt-stained names, rivers that ran uphill toward mercy.

At the edge of his last map she found a square of white paper, uncommitted, and understood this was the gift:

the place where knowledge stops and the hand still moves, tracing what it cannot see but knows.

She filled that square with her own coast, ragged and approximate and hers, a shore that has no name yet but is real.