The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines of what she no longer knows, tracing where the harbor used to open into a name she once could call across a room. The pencil finds the shore and finds the shore again.

Some rooms were swallowed slowly, the way a field gives itself to fog before the fog has touched it — first the fence, then the smell of cut wood by the fence, then the fence itself going soft and secondary.

She marks the places with small x's, the way old maps notated sea monsters: here, the voice that laughed before you knew the laugh was meant for you. Here, the word for the blue that lived inside that kitchen.

The atlas grows heavier. She carries it from table to window and back, studying what she has managed to preserve — these careful blanks, these tender nothing-shapes of what was full.

At the center of every map is a point the cartographer cannot locate herself within. She draws a circle there. She writes: I was here. The ink dries before the meaning does.