The Cartographer and the Sea
He drew maps for a living.
Not of roads, but of promises
Soft lines where her laughter once lived,
tiny arrows
where her eyes used to point
when she couldn’t say stay.
She was the sea
Ever folding into herself,
a hymn of salt and leaving.
No harbor could hold her,
no anchor dared ask.
He traced her tides in silence,
built cartographies of could-have-beens,
and marked in inkless ink:
here be ghosts.
She tried, once,
to live on land
to breathe stillness,
to fold her waves into windows.
But the sea is not a creature
meant for ceilings.
So she left.
And the world kept spinning
in the wrong direction.
In some other verse,
some bend of time,
she learns to stay.
He forgets to wait.
But the ending,
like gravity,
refuses to rewrite itself.
Every love story
has a map.
Theirs had no destination.
Only a compass
that spun
and spun
and spun.
--
April 2024
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