The Cartographer of Forgetting

She folds the map along creases that no longer match the roads— towns renamed, rivers redirected, a border dissolved into grass.

The old highway appears in blue where now only rabbits cross. She traces it with one finger as if the paper remembers what the ground has unlearned.

Some places she leaves blank, white voids where she once lived and cannot return to living. A legend at the bottom reads: here the scale becomes unreliable.

At night she pins the map above her bed and reads it like a sky— each smudge a constellation, each torn edge a coastline pulled slowly under tide.

She will never finish correcting it. That is the work: to keep the old and the new in the same trembling hand.