The Cartographer of Forgetting

She draws the coastlines of what she no longer knows, penciling in bays where laughter once pooled, the shoreline ragged now, eroded— each wave a year taking something small.

The mountain range of a father's voice still rises in the east of her, but the peak has gone soft, indistinct as chalk left in rain.

She finds the cities hardest— those dense, bright places where whole seasons were spent beneath the canopy of another person. The streets will not hold still.

At night she smooths the paper, presses her palm against the white, and something underneath her hand insists it was there, it was real— the warmth of the parchment proof enough.

She keeps drawing. The legend grows stranger every year, full of symbols she invented herself: a crescent for almost, a broken circle for the names that left before she thought to write them down.