Cartography of an empty bed

The left side of the bed is still a foreign country I have no visa for.

I sleep on my border, pressed to the edge, as if there were still a need to leave room for a customs post that closed its doors long ago.

I've tried to annex the territory: I stretch out an arm, I occupy, I set a book where there used to be someone. But the book doesn't breathe, gives no warmth, doesn't complain when I steal the sheet.

The geography of the body has a poor memory: it goes on drawing the map of a continent that sank without warning, sketching by night the coastlines of an island that no longer appears on any nautical chart of the present.

I wake in the middle of the bed like an explorer who reaches, at last, the centre of an uninhabited country and discovers that the conquest was never on the other side: it was learning to inhabit whole what for years I only half shared.