The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws coastlines at midnight, the lamp pooling gold across her wrist. Every shore she traces was already lost before the ink dried.

The sea forgets its own edges. She knows this. Still the pencil moves — bays she will never anchor in, mountains that have since given themselves to erosion.

There is a country marked only with her initials and the year she stopped believing in fixed coordinates. It sits at the center of the map, surrounded by careful hatching that means: here the distances are wrong.

By morning the paper has absorbed the lamplight. She folds the world in half, and half again, until the lost country fits inside a coat pocket — weightless, and easier to carry than the open chart.