The air here tastes of graphite and regret. It’s a flavor I’ve come to recognize, a constant companion in the pursuit of what isn’t. We build these maps, you see. Not of places, precisely, but of the spaces between them. The gaps where the river should flow, the mountains that never rose, the cities that vanished before they were drawn. They are not absences, not really. They are points of potential, echoes of choices not made, futures unlived.
I began this work with a single sheet. A blank expanse, a terrifying invitation. The first lines were tentative, hesitant. They represented the memory of a coastline I’d never seen, a phantom shoreline constructed from whispered tales and the fading ink of a cartographer’s obsession. Each stroke was an attempt to fill the void, to give form to the intangible. But the more I filled, the more the emptiness seemed to grow. It’s a paradoxical process, isn’t it? The act of representing absence inevitably amplifies it.
The process is not linear. There are regressions, loops, moments where entire sections are erased and redrawn, only to be discarded again. It’s as if the sheet itself is resisting, attempting to maintain its neutrality. Perhaps it knows something we don’t: that the true map isn’t of the world, but of the human desire to impose order upon chaos, to find meaning in the meaningless.
I’ve noticed a peculiar effect. As the sheet grows denser with these imagined territories, with these ghosts of geography, it begins to vibrate. Not audibly, but… energetically. Like a tuning fork struck with immense force. I believe it's absorbing the weight of the unwritten. The accumulated sorrow of all the roads not taken.
Some say it's madness. That I'm chasing shadows. They tell me to abandon this endeavor, to accept the limitations of perception. But I cannot. Because within these lines, within these carefully crafted voids, I find a kind of truth. A truth about the nature of memory, of loss, of the relentless pull of the unknown.