What the Cartographer Left Unnamed

At the edge of the known map, a blank field where the ink ran dry and the hand lifted— not from fear, but from something softer, the refusal to press a name onto silence.

My grandmother kept a drawer of unnamed things: a button without a coat, a key without a door, a photograph of a man she wouldn't say. Some things stay truer without a word laid over them.

The cartographers of old drew sea-monsters into the unmeasured water—not lies, but a kind of honesty: here is where our knowing ends, here the world continues without us.

I walk to the edge of what I can say about you and find the same white space, the same absence that isn't absence— just the world before I learned to name it, still there, still vivid, still going on.