Cartography of a Breaking Heart by rahees ibn rafeeq

No one teaches you
how to map a disappearance.

At first,
it is only a small absence—
a chair pulled slightly away from the table,
a name that echoes
one second too long.

You tell yourself
it is nothing.

But grief is a quiet cartographer.
It redraws everything.

Doors begin to lead
to places that no longer exist.
Windows forget
what they were meant to hold.

Even time
loses its straight lines—
folding into corners
where memories wait,
unaged and unfinished.

I tried to measure it—
this vanishing.

Used rulers made of logic,
compasses built from reason,
but every line I drew
curved back into you.

So I stopped mapping.

Let the distances grow wild,
let the borders blur,
let the unnamed spaces
remain unnamed.

Because some losses
are not meant to be understood—

only carried,

like a country
that no longer appears on any map,
yet lives on
in the language
of your pulse.