The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in contour lines, her father's hand tracing mountains she'd never climbed, rivers held still in blue ink long after they'd shifted their banks.

Every map a promise of what was — the villages renamed, the borders drawn and redrawn like arguments that outlast the people who started them. She kept his pencils. The erasers worn to nothing.

Now she draws the city she grew up in from memory, and finds it smaller than the one she carries, the distances between things measured in something other than miles.

What do we inherit but the shape of loss — someone else's legend, someone else's north? She marks her own house with an X, then lifts the pen, leaves it unmarked, lets it rest in the white of the uncharted.