The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines of what she no longer knows— the harbor where her father's voice once anchored, the particular slant of kitchen light in winter. Each shore is moving, she has learned. Each shore is always moving.

The instrument she uses has no name. Something between a needle and a held breath, dragging its fine point across the paper where continents used to be. Now: white. Now: approximate.

Some territories she visits every morning so they will not dissolve— the way rain smells arriving from the west, the syllables of names she will not speak aloud for fear of wearing them smooth.

What remains grows stranger, not smaller: a grocery list in her grandmother's hand, the specific weight of a sleeping child across the shoulder, the moment before a decision, thick and amber, impossible to cross.

She folds the map each night along the creases that were there before she started. The world fits back inside her palm. She holds it. Somewhere, a shore is drawing itself new.