The Cartographer's Last Shore

She spent her life drawing coastlines that the sea kept revising— each survey a small argument with water, each boundary a guess dressed in ink.

Her instruments grew heavy with age, the sextant clouded at its eye. She measured anyway, bending low over tide pools that held the whole sky.

What she mapped was never the land but the hunger of land for its edge— how limestone leans into salt wind and lets itself be slowly misread.

At the end she left all her charts unmarked, rolled in the corner like unfinished questions. The sea, she wrote in her last notebook, does not need our names to be deep.