She had finished seventeen maps in six years: the Country of First Love, the Shame Lands, the Territory of Long Marriage, the Waiting Territories in three distinct regions, and eleven others commissioned by institutions whose work required navigating emotional geographies with some precision. She had always finished.
The Grief Country commission had been open for eight months.
The difficulty was not measurement. She had good instruments. The difficulty was that the country changed between visits.
She mapped on a Tuesday; she returned on a Thursday and the rivers had moved. Not far, and not in a way that could be confirmed by any instrument she carried, but she knew. She had been mapping long enough to know what she knew.
Her supervisor, who was practical and had never himself visited any of the countries she mapped, suggested she simply note the rivers as approximate and move on. She had tried this. The map she produced using approximate rivers was wrong in a way she could not prove but also could not submit.
The Archive was the other problem.
She had located it three times on three separate visits. She had the coordinates. Each time she approached it, she got within a hundred meters and then found herself walking away without having made the decision to walk away. She would be there, and then she would be farther from it, and the space between those two states was not in her notes.
She told herself this was a methodology problem. She believed this less each month.
Her father had died two years ago. She had not thought of herself as a resident of the Grief Country; she had thought of herself as someone who had passed through it and returned. She was a professional. She had navigated harder territories.
She opened her current draft of the map and looked at the Archive, marked with a circle and a question mark. The rest of the country was mostly complete. The rivers were approximate. The flatlands were accurately rendered. The language was in the appendix.
There was one section of the interior she had not been able to enter.
She picked up her pen. She put it down. She looked at the map for a long time.