What the Cartographer Left Out

The map insists the river ends at the border, a clean blue termination, but I have stood where the water keeps going into the unnamed dark of another country.

My grandmother's village is a white space the size of a thumbnail, where the index says only: terrain unclear, and beneath that, in pencil: do not rely.

Still, I trace the road her feet must have known— the gradient of mud after rain, the place the poplars lean as if listening to something the soil keeps saying underground.

Every map is a record of what someone chose to name, chose to measure. The rest is silence shaped like a country, a life drawn in the margins and then erased.

I fold the paper along its old creases. The river continues. Her village hums beneath the white space like a word held too long in the mouth.