The Cartographer's Insomnia

She draws the coastline from memory now, the peninsula where her mother's house stood bent like a question mark into the sea. The pencil knows the curve before her hand does.

Some places only exist in the act of returning — the smell of cedar, low tide, a particular light that landed like a hand on the back of the neck. She shades the harbor dark where the depth was never charted.

The legend has no symbol for grief. She invents one: a small cross, hollow at its center, placed at each inlet where she once stood watching something arrive that did not stay.

In the margin she writes: *Here the water was the color of old mirrors.* She does not explain this. The map will know what it means.