The Cartographer's Last Map

She draws the coastline from memory now, fingers tracing where the salt-grass bent under the weight of July, the harbor mouth that swallowed fog each morning whole.

The ink dries wrong — too pale, nothing like the color of those waters which held the boats like open palms, which gave them back by afternoon.

She marks an X where the lighthouse stood before the season took it, labels a road that ended in the sea, names a village no longer answerable to its name.

All maps are elegies, she says to no one. Every line a thing that was, every border a grief made navigable.

She folds it once, then again, until the coastline meets itself, the island touching what surrounds it — the way loss and the lost become, at last, the same country.