The Cartographer's Insomnia

At three in the morning he draws the coast again — not the coast as it is but as he found it once, the tide already pulling back its evidence, leaving only the scalloped edge of having been.

He charts the shallow bay where his father stood knee-deep and called to something in the water. No answer came. The reeds gave only light refracted, bending where the surface held.

The pen moves east across unmeasured ground, placing rivers that ran dry before he was born — how they must have sounded, heavy with snowmelt, how the willows leaned toward all that noise.

By dawn the paper has grown thick with coastline. He folds the map along its oldest crease and sets it with the others, drawer on drawer, each one a year he walked without a compass.