Cartography of Forgetting

The river forgets the shape of the stone the way stone forgets the river — each carrying a ghost of the other worn smooth into silence.

I have misplaced the sound of your voice the way fog misplaces the mountain: the mountain still there, still cold, still casting its unmeasured shadow.

Maps are drawn by those who have already left. You cannot chart what you are still inside of — the forest of a Thursday afternoon, the coordinates of your mother's hands.

What remains: the ache of negative space, a drawer that opens to light, not objects, the outline where the key once pressed its particular logic into wood.

Everything you love becomes cartography eventually. You learn the territory by what you can no longer find.