The Cartographer's Daughter

She learned the world in pencil lines, her father's drafting table still smelling of cedar shavings and doubt. Every coastline is a guess, he told her, the sea does not hold still for anyone.

She grew up folding and unfolding the same yellowed atlas, pressing her thumb into cities she would never visit, leaving her own small meridians.

Now she draws maps of what cannot be mapped — the way grief occupies a house, moving from room to room like weather, how certain afternoons thicken with the scent of someone already gone.

Her lines converge on nothing that exists. She pencils in the coastline anyway, knowing the sea will have shifted, knowing that to name a place is to lose it twice.