What the Cartographer Forgot

The old maps mark rivers that no longer run, name forests swallowed by the century's thirst. Somewhere a dotted line trails off as if the hand that drew it simply grew tired of knowing.

I have walked into edges like these— places the legend doesn't cover, where the terrain insists on itself without permission, without the comfort of a scale.

My grandmother's kitchen exists in no atlas I can find. The smell of burnt sugar and cardamom, the window light that made a stripe across the linoleum every morning at nine.

What survives of us is not the document but the residue—salt rings on wood, a thumbprint pressed into the margin of someone's careful work, saying: I was also here, I was also hungry.

The cartographer forgot that maps are elegies. Every border drawn is a grief assigned to territory, a name given after the leaving.