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.