The Cartographer's Daughter

Her father drew borders in India ink, thin lines that named the silence between mountains, that told rivers where they ended.

She kept his tools in a cedar box — the bone folder worn smooth, the compass whose needle still trembled north as if it couldn't help itself.

When she opened an atlas now she did not see countries. She saw the hours after supper, his hand moving slow and certain over paper thin enough to tear on breath.

She has no children of her own but sometimes takes a pen and traces coastlines she has never stood beside, feels the drag of something pulling her toward the edge of the mapped world

where her father taught her the most honest cartographers write: here the land keeps going, we simply stopped.