Disappearing maps

I was just twelve when I first understood that maps could be deceptive. Not the harmless kind of errors—like a misspelled name or a river drawn a bit off—but the more profound kind of deceit, the sort that wipes entire places off the face of the earth. It all started with a well-worn atlas I stumbled upon in my dad’s study, its spine worn and its pages carrying a faint scent of dust and tobacco. This book had belonged to my grandfather, who kept it close to his armchair like some might keep a Bible, flipping through it in the evenings as if it were a sacred text of borders and rivers. 

One rainy afternoon, I found myself flipping through its pages, tracing the outlines of continents with my fingertip. The world appeared both familiar and strange: countries with names I had never heard of, borders that had vanished. In Africa, there was a place called Rhodesia. In Europe, a section was labeled Czechoslovakia. Even more unsettling were the towns my father used to talk about—small coastal villages from his childhood—now completely missing. They had been reduced to mere dots, swallowed by larger cities or erased, as if the mapmaker had deemed them unworthy of existence. 

That moment hit me hard in a way I couldn’t articulate at twelve. How could a place, filled with people, homes, and bustling markets, just disappear? Yet, the atlas presented it as if it were the most normal thing in the world—almost inevitable. There was no footnote, no acknowledgment. Just space where lives had once thrived. 

Years later, I would come to understand that cartographers refer to this as “generalization”—the act of leaving out small towns, minor roads, or lesser landmarks when creating maps at certain scales. The earth is too intricate, too messy, to fit neatly onto paper. Decisions have to be made about what to show and what to omit. But as a child, I didn’t see it as a practical choice. I saw it as a quiet betrayal. 

That atlas was my first real lesson in how places can just fade away. Some disappear because of political decisions, erased by a signature during a late-night deal. Others slowly vanish under economic pressures, with small towns losing their residents until all that’s left are boarded-up windows and weeds pushing through the cracks in the sidewalks. Then there are the places that fall prey to nature itself: coastlines that crumble into the ocean, glaciers that retreat until the valleys are left bare, deserts that inch forward grain by grain. 

As I grew older, I began to understand that the atlas wasn’t exactly lying—it just presented a version of the truth. Every map does that. The more I traveled, the more I noticed the gaps between what’s on paper and what’s there, between memory and reality. Take that fishing village in Kenya where I once enjoyed fresh tilapia on a paper plate? It’s gone now, swallowed up by a government project to expand the port. Or that train station in New England where I sat on a wooden bench, watching the snow pile up against the tracks? It’s been torn down and replaced with a parking garage.

We often think of loss in terms of death, but places can die too. The grief feels different, more spread out, because there’s no funeral for a demolished street or a submerged valley. The absence creeps in slowly: a closed shop, a school that never reopens, the last family packing up and leaving. Yet the pain is very real. You return, hoping to find the world as it once was, only to discover a void. 

That ache hit me in my early twenties during a trip to central China. I had read about the Three Gorges Dam, the largest hydroelectric project in the world, and how millions of people were displaced to make way for the rising waters. As I stood on a ferryboat, I watched entire towns submerged beneath the green surface of the Yangtze River. Locals shared stories of ancestral graves being moved, temples taken apart brick by brick, and orchards cut down before the valley filled up. What struck me the most wasn’t just the scale of the engineering but the eerie silence that hung over the water. Whole communities, their histories, and dialects were wiped away by a reservoir—and the official maps, of course, only showed the neat, blue rectangle of a lake, as if it had always been there. 

That’s when I started to see maps as tombstones. They’re records of what used to be, etched in lines and symbols. And like all tombstones, they can be misread, weathered, or even replaced. 

As a writer, I began to keep my own “counter-map,” jotting down names of forgotten towns, noting buildings I worried might not last, and marking landscapes I thought could change in my lifetime. It became my quiet act of resistance, an effort to remember what the official charts would eventually erase. It wasn’t about nostalgia; it was about refusing to let places disappear without a trace. 

But here’s the surprising part: I realized that sometimes disappearance isn’t just physical—it’s psychological. A place can fade away long before the bulldozers show up if no one remembers it, talks about it, or cares for it. Memory itself acts as a kind of cartography, and when we stop mapping a place in our minds, it becomes invisible. I think of my grandmother’s village in the hills, which was abandoned when the younger generation left for city jobs. The houses still stand, with roof tiles slipping and windows gaping like eyes, but in family conversations, the village rarely comes up. Already, it feels more like a ghost than a place. 

Maps do more than just show us our location; they reveal what we’ve chosen to remember and what we’ve let slip away. Sometimes, they even expose the comforting lies we tell ourselves. As I pondered this while gazing at an old atlas, I realized this wouldn’t be the last time I’d encounter places that have faded from existence. The world is dotted with them—some submerged, some covered by concrete, and others quietly left behind. To explore their stories is to navigate a shadow atlas, one that runs alongside the official maps, carrying the weight of what has been lost. 

So, I embarked on a sort of pilgrimage—not to revered sites or sacred artifacts, but to the voids left behind. I sought out ghost towns, sunken valleys, and neighborhoods erased 

for highways. In my quest for what no longer exists, I found that loss itself can serve as a guide, leading us to the truths we often overlook. 

If a map can deceive, perhaps it can also reveal deeper truths. By listening to the echoes of what has vanished, we might uncover unexpected insights about what remains. Water has always played a dual role, both nurturing and taking away. Civilizations have thrived along its shores, yet it has also consumed them without a second thought. Walking along certain lakeshores or river valleys reminds us that beneath the surface lies another world, one built of bricks and memories, hidden until someone dares to share its tale. 

I often think of the villages submerged beneath reservoirs—those intentional drownings, all in the name of progress. The irony is striking: water was intended to bring electricity, irrigation, and prosperity, yet it demanded a sacrifice of place. 

In Massachusetts, there used to be a group of four towns known as Dana, Prescott, Greenwich, and Enfield. They thrived for over two hundred years, filled with farms, churches, libraries, and neighbors who were on a first-name basis. But in the 1930s, they were wiped off the map to make room for the Quabbin Reservoir, which is now one of the largest man-made lakes in the U.S. People were uprooted, buildings were torn down, and even cemeteries were relocated. Today, this reservoir supplies drinking water to Boston. Yet, beneath its serene blue surface lie roads that once echoed with the sounds of horse-drawn wagons, the foundations of schools where children learned their lessons, and stone walls that once defined family properties. 

When I visited the Quabbin years ago, it struck me as more of a graveyard than a reservoir. Trails wound through forests that hid remnants of the past—stone steps leading to nowhere and cellar holes now blanketed in moss. Signs warned visitors against swimming or fishing in certain coves, as if the water itself needed to remain untouched, sacred in its stillness. Standing at the water’s edge, I could almost hear the whispers of the town below, a faint echo of life that felt just out of reach. 

But the Quabbin isn’t an isolated case. Around the world, entire villages have been sacrificed for the sake of dams. In India, the Narmada Valley Project displaced over two hundred thousand people. In China, the Three Gorges Dam forced more than a million residents to relocate, submerging over a thousand towns and archaeological sites that had stood for centuries. Archaeologists raced against time before the flooding, trying to salvage artifacts, but many sites were lost forever. While the official story celebrated the benefits of hydroelectric power and flood control, for those who had to leave their homes, no amount of electricity could ever replace the land of their ancestors. 

I remember chatting with a Chinese woman named Mei, who had to leave her riverside village and move to an apartment block hundreds of kilometers away. Her family had called that riverbank home for generations, growing oranges and fishing in the shallows. She shared with me, “They gave us money for our house, but not for our river.” That hit me: governments can pay for buildings, but they can’t compensate for the water that’s been part of your life since you were born, or for the view of cliffs or the sound of boats tied up at dawn. 

But sometimes, water doesn’t wait for permission. It crashes in uninvited, swallowing places whole through floods and rising seas. Entire towns can vanish in just one night of heavy rain. Take Villarrubia in Spain, for instance; in 1911, it was swallowed by floodwaters after a dam upstream gave way. Survivors recounted waking up to the deafening roar of water, scrambling for the hills as their homes were swept away. Nowadays, climate change is turning coastal communities into slow-motion tragedies. In Alaska, indigenous villages like Shishmaref and Kivalina are losing ground to the relentless sea. Residents are torn over whether to move inland, but for them, the land is more than just property—it’s their identity, their stories, and their burial grounds. Leaving means severing ties with their ancestors. 

There’s something hauntingly unique about towns that have been submerged. Fires leave behind ashes, earthquakes leave rubble, and wars leave ruins. But water? It leaves no visible trace. It smooths everything over with its indifferent touch. A visitor to a reservoir might see only beauty—a glistening blue expanse framed by hills. The real tragedy lies hidden beneath the surface. Unless you know the backstory, you could easily drive by without a second thought, completely unaware that below the water lies a schoolhouse, a church, or a kitchen table where someone once celebrated a birthday. 

Some submerged places occasionally make a reappearance, almost as if they want to remind us of their enduring presence. Take Italy’s old village of Curon Venosta, for instance. It was submerged back in 1950 to create a hydroelectric lake, leaving only the stone bell tower of the church peeking above the water, like a finger pointing skyward. In winter, when the lake freezes over, you can walk right up to it. This tower has turned into a tourist hotspot, but it also stands as a symbol of resilience—an assertion that history can’t be completely wiped away. 

Closer to home, during droughts, the foundations of sunken towns emerge from reservoirs like bones laid bare by shifting earth. Dry spells have uncovered bridges, staircases, and even entire street layouts. People flock to photograph these remnants, wandering among the ruins like modern-day archaeologists in jeans and sneakers. But then the rains come back, and all that evidence slips beneath the waves again, waiting for the next cycle to reveal it. 

What strikes me is how often these stories remain untold. Schoolchildren in Boston learn that their water comes from the Quabbin, but they rarely hear about Dana or Enfield. Tourists marvel at the impressive Hoover Dam, yet few stop to consider what towns were sacrificed to create Lake Mead. Progress often demands clean narratives—ones that celebrate growth and efficiency. The messier truth—that towns were lost and histories erased—often gets drowned not just in water, but in silence.

Yet, if you speak with the descendants of those displaced, the memories linger on. I once attended a reunion of families whose towns were swallowed by the Quabbin. They gathered in a church hall miles away from the reservoir, sharing faded photographs and recounting tales of streets that have vanished. For them, memory serves as a kind of dry land, a space they can still traverse even if the physical town is no longer there. One elderly gentleman shared with me, “Every time I drink a glass of water, I think of my hometown. It’s still here, just spread out across Boston.” 

His words lingered in my mind. What does it truly mean to live in a place that no longer exists? To come to terms with the fact that your childhood home has vanished, not by chance, but by choice? It’s more than just being uprooted; it’s like rewriting the very fabric of geography. You’re left grappling with a paradox: the place exists in your heart and memory, yet it’s physically gone, replaced by something new, something that serves someone else’s needs. 

The submerged towns remind us of a harsh reality: the world we inhabit isn’t set in stone. What feels solid beneath us can be wiped away with a single government decision, a construction project, or a shift in climate. Maps change, waters rise, and our memories struggle to keep pace. 

That’s why I find myself drawn to reservoirs. It’s not the electricity they provide that calls me; it’s the need to remember what was lost. I stand at their banks, gazing at the glassy surface, trying to envision the hidden streets below. It’s a way of listening—to the silence, to the void, to the echoes of voices that once filled those spaces. In that act of listening, I feel a weighty responsibility: to carry those memories forward, to chart what the official maps have chosen to overlook. 

Not every disappearance is abrupt, like a town swallowed by a reservoir. Some fade away so slowly that we hardly notice, until one day we look around and see that everything has shifted. Landscapes can disappear too—not through destruction, but by transforming into something unrecognizable. 

When I was a teenager, my family visited Glacier National Park in Montana. Even back then, park rangers were urging visitors to “see the glaciers before they’re gone.” At the time, it felt a bit overdramatic, like a catchy slogan to attract tourists. But they weren’t exaggerating. In the mid-19th century, the park boasted over 100 named glaciers. Now, fewer than 25 are still large enough to be called glaciers. Scientists predict that in just a few decades, there may be none left at all. 

I can still picture myself standing on a ridge, gazing out at Grinnell Glacier, where rivulets of meltwater danced down its stunning blue-white surface. It felt timeless, like a grand monument carved into the mountains. But the interpretive signs told a different tale, displaying side-by-side photos that revealed how dramatically the ice had retreated over the years. The contrast was shocking. What used to stretch across a vast valley had shrunk to a mere sliver, as thin as a sheet pulled too tightly over a bed.

What’s fascinating about glaciers is how they serve as markers of time. They expand and contract over centuries, reflecting climate changes that are almost beyond human understanding. Yet, with our current warming trends, that timeline has been drastically shortened. In just one human lifetime, a glacier that took thousands of years to form can disappear completely. For those of us who grew up thinking of mountains and ice as the ultimate symbols of permanence, witnessing their rapid decline feels surreal, almost like watching stone dissolve before our eyes. 

Forests are disappearing too, but in a much louder way. Deforestation is a process that’s both natural and unnatural: storms topple trees, fires sweep through valleys, but these are cycles that forests have weathered for ages. What’s different now is the sheer scale and speed of human clearing. In the Amazon, vast swathes of jungle are being cut down to make way for soy farms and cattle pastures. The outcome is not just the loss of trees but the obliteration of entire ecosystems, species, and indigenous communities that have thrived there for generations. 

I once met a man from an Amazonian village who shared with me, “When the forest goes, our memory goes too.” He wasn’t being poetic. His people’s stories, medicines, and rituals are all intricately linked to specific trees, rivers, and clearings. Without them, their culture risks unraveling. A map of deforestation might show neat squares of land transformed into agricultural fields, but it fails to capture the deeper loss—the cultural silencing and the forgetting that inevitably follows. 

It’s striking how even the smallest landscapes can change so dramatically. Take the farm field near my childhood home, where I spent countless hours chasing grasshoppers through the tall wheat. Now, it’s been transformed into a shopping complex. The oak trees where I built my childhood treehouse? They were bulldozed to make way for a new subdivision. While these changes might not seem as monumental as the loss of the Amazon rainforest or melting glaciers, they still represent the disappearance of places that once felt so familiar. The scale may be smaller, but the feeling—the realization that something once solid has vanished—is just as profound. 

And then there are deserts. Unlike forests or glaciers that shrink away, deserts expand. In northern Africa, the Sahara is creeping southward each year, swallowing up farmland and entire villages. This isn’t a dramatic flood; it’s a slow, relentless advance, measured in grains of sand. For those living on the edges, the impact is just as heartbreaking. 

I recall reading about a farmer in Mali whose fields used to flourish with millet and sorghum. Each year, he noted, the sand crept closer, blurring the line between his farm and the encroaching desert. Eventually, he had to leave, swept up in the wave of climate migration. His farm is gone now—not submerged in water, but buried beneath the sand. 

What ties all these stories together is how they challenge our understanding of permanence. Maps give us a sense of stability, creating the illusion that things are fixed: here’s the mountain, there’s the river, and over there is the forest. But landscapes are anything but static. They’re constantly shifting, eroding, blooming, and retreating. The real issue isn’t that change occurs—it always has—but that we’re currently experiencing a time when change is happening so rapidly that it’s hard for us to keep up. 

Sometimes I find myself pondering what it will be like for future generations to inherit a world devoid of glaciers in Glacier National Park or the Amazon rainforest as we know it. Will they read about these breathtaking landscapes the same way we read about legendary places—like Atlantis or the Hanging Gardens of Babylon—caught between belief and skepticism about their existence? Will the word “glacier” become just another term without a real reference, much like “phonograph” or “telegraph”? 

Then there’s the matter of memory. The landscapes around us shape our identities, often in ways we don’t fully grasp until they’re no longer there. I remember winters filled with heavy snowfalls that buried cars and forced schools to close; now, my nieces and nephews experience winters with hardly any snow at all. Their understanding of the seasons, their idea of what “normal” looks like, is so different from mine. This evolving baseline of memory—what scientists refer to as “shifting baseline syndrome”—means that each generation comes to accept a diminished world as the norm. If your childhood forest disappears, you might not even miss it because you never truly knew it. Loss can be sneaky like that, burying memories beneath new realities. 

I can’t help but think back to that atlas from my childhood. Its forests were a rich green, and its glaciers were marked in bright white. But those symbols didn’t convey any sense of fragility. A green patch on a map seems everlasting, while a white streak of ice appears unchanging. It’s only when you’re standing on the ground, inhaling the thin air atop a mountain ridge, or watching a chainsaw whir through a massive tree, that you truly grasp how fleeting it all is. 

And here’s the surprising truth: landscapes don’t just vanish; they transform into shapes that can be hard for us to recognize. A glacier turns into a stream, a forest morphs into farmland, and a desert might even become a sea. What disappears isn’t the physical matter, but the continuity—the familiar thread that allows us to name a place. We lose that sense of permanence, the comforting idea that the world will look the same tomorrow as it did yesterday. 

That loss can be unsettling, but it also brings clarity. When we realize a glacier is melting, we start to listen more closely to the sound of the meltwater. When we know a forest is in danger, we find ourselves leaning in to study the bark, memorizing its textures. Maybe the gift of these changes is that they sharpen our focus, reminding us that every landscape is fleeting, and every map is just a temporary guide. 

Yet, I can’t shake the feeling that there’s something deeper at play. A world without glaciers or rainforests isn’t just a place with a different view—it’s a world that carries a different meaning. Our metaphors, our myths, and our imaginations are tied to these landscapes. Without them, our stories begin to shrink. And if our stories fade away, so does our memory. If memory disappears, then no matter how detailed they are, maps become nothing but falsehoods. 

When we discuss places disappearing, we often think about geography: ice melting, forests falling, rivers drying up. But there’s another kind of disappearance that’s quieter and harder to quantify—the erosion of memory. A town might still be there, but if no one remembers its stories, it’s already half lost. A landscape may still exist, but if no one recalls how it used to look, it becomes untethered, stripped of its context. 

I stumbled upon this lesson quite unexpectedly during a chat with my grandmother. She grew up in a tiny farming community in the Midwest, a place she often referred to as “a dot on the road.” As a kid, I was captivated by her tales of walking to a one-room schoolhouse or ice skating on the frozen creek during winter. Fast forward a few decades, and I found myself driving through that area, eager to see it with my own eyes. The schoolhouse was nowhere to be found. The creek was still there, but it was shallow and sluggish, no longer thick enough to skate on. When I shared this with my grandmother, she looked at me with a hint of pity. “Of course it’s gone,” she replied, as if I should have already known that. 

What hit me wasn’t just the absence of buildings or ice—it was the realization that once she was gone, so too would the memory of that place. The town had long since shrunk to just a handful of houses; its name barely made it onto modern maps. Yet in her stories, it was vibrant, bustling, alive. Without her voice, it would fade into silence. 

This fragility of memory is all around us. Migrant workers crossing borders often leave behind not just their homes but also the maps of familiarity—the corner store, the neighborhood park, the shortcut to school. Refugees may never return to the villages they once called home, and over time, even in their minds, the details start to blur. Was the mosque next to the river or the road? Was the fig tree in the center of the square or by the well? Memories shift, overlap, and fade. And as they do, the place itself—though still physically there—becomes unreachable. 

I once came across a fascinating Japanese word, ubasute, which refers to a mythical practice of leaving an elderly family member on a mountain to die. Whether this ever truly happened is up for debate, but the word itself carries a heavy weight, evoking feelings of abandonment and being forgotten. Sometimes, I think about disappearing places in a similar light. When we neglect to remember them, when the stories fade away, we essentially carry them up the mountain of time and leave them there, all alone.  

In today’s fast-paced world, this process speeds up even more. We find ourselves moving frequently, uprooted by jobs, education, or new opportunities. Very few people are born, live, and die in the same town anymore. While this mobility opens doors, it also leads to forgetfulness. The places from our childhood, if we don’t revisit them, start to blend in our minds. I once attempted to sketch a map of my old neighborhood, only to realize, much to my surprise, that I couldn’t recall the name of the street behind ours or the arrangement of the houses on the corner. The park I remembered as vast turned out, when I visited as an adult, to be just a small patch of grass. My mental map had shifted over time. In a way, that place had already faded away before I even had the chance to return.  

Technology adds another layer to this. Google Earth allows us to zoom in on almost any spot on the planet, but this flood of images can diminish our memories. If we can always “revisit” a place through a satellite view, we might feel less compelled to remember it ourselves. Yet, what gets lost in that digital snapshot is the richness of experience—the scent of lilac bushes, the sound of footsteps on a wooden bridge, the chorus of cicadas at dusk. No photograph or satellite image can truly capture the full depth of our memories. 

I once came across a fascinating project called “Memory of Place,” where people were invited to sketch maps of their childhood neighborhoods from memory. The outcomes were a mix of whimsical charm and poignant nostalgia. Some maps were incredibly detailed, showcasing careful drawings of houses and street names, while others were more abstract, featuring simple labels like “my house,” “friend’s house,” “school,” and “mysterious trees.” This exercise highlighted not just how much we forget, but also what we choose to remember. Memory turns into a kind of selective mapping, capturing only what feels important, while everything else fades away into the background. 

And sometimes, forgetting isn’t just a slip of the mind—it’s intentional. Colonial powers wiped out indigenous place names, replacing them with new ones. Streets were renamed, rivers were redrawn, and borders were imposed. The aim wasn’t just to conquer land but to conquer memory itself. Renaming a river cuts its story from the people who once cherished it. Destroying a sacred site creates a void where memory used to thrive. In this sense, erasing memory is a form of violence, just as destructive as bulldozers or floods. 

This leads me to ponder: do places truly disappear when they’re physically destroyed, or when they’re forgotten? Maybe the two are intertwined. I think about the ancient city of Troy. For centuries, it was thought to be a myth, a figment of literature. It wasn’t until archaeologists uncovered its ruins that the world reconnected with its physical existence. But during that time, did Troy still exist? The stones lay buried, yet in the human imagination, the city had already faded away. 

As I think about more recent times, I can’t help but picture the villages left behind after the Chernobyl disaster. The houses are still there, with wallpaper peeling and toys gathering dust on the shelves, yet no one calls them home anymore. These ghost towns, now overrun with trees, somehow feel more vibrant than the empty fields around them, even as they slowly fade from our collective memory. Kids born today have no real connection to these places. In a generation or two, they might become as distant as Troy—once real, but now just a story. 

The risk of forgetting isn’t just a personal loss; it’s a shared one. When we forget about a floodplain, we end up building right in its way. When we overlook a famine, we’re doomed to repeat the same mistakes. Memory isn’t merely about nostalgia—it’s about survival. Maps can show us coordinates, but memory carries warnings, lessons, and significance. Without memory, a map is just a collection of lines and symbols, disconnected from the human experience tied to a place. 

There’s a bit of a paradox here. To keep a place alive in our memories, we need to share its story. But in sharing, we also change it. Each time we tell it, we might highlight certain details or leave others out, like a map that gets redrawn until the original landscape is barely recognizable. This fluidity of memory means that even when we strive to hold onto places in our minds, they shift, grow, and blur. The real question isn’t whether a place will vanish, but how it will transform—into a story, a myth, a legend, or perhaps just silence. 

Maybe the biggest danger isn’t that we forget, but that we forget we’ve forgotten. We stroll through cities without a clue about what was torn down to make way for them. We drive along highways, oblivious to the fact that they were once footpaths or rivers. We gaze at forests without realizing how vast they once were. The erasures are so thorough that we don’t even feel the absence anymore. And in that unawareness, we lose our ability to grieve. 

It’s in moments of mourning that our memories and the places we cherish intertwine most deeply. Mourning isn’t just about acknowledging loss; it also serves as a testament to existence. To grieve for a glacier that has melted away, a neighborhood that has been bulldozed, or a creek that has been forgotten is to say: this mattered. While it may not bring back what’s lost, it stands against the silence of being forgotten. 

On my desk, there’s an old paper map of the United States, all creased and worn from years spent tucked away in a glove compartment. When I unfold it, I come across towns I’ve never heard of—many of which have vanished from existence. Some were once bustling railroad stops, others mining camps, and some have been completely swallowed up by highways. Yet, on this map, they remain, fossilized in ink, even as the world has moved on without them. 

I’ve come to realize that places live a double life: they exist in the physical world and our memories. When one fades away, the other sometimes lingers. But in the end, both can disappear. This fragility prompts a profound question: how should we live, knowing that even the most seemingly permanent landscapes are just temporary? 

One answer lies in being present. It’s about truly noticing where we are while we’re there—listening to the whispers of the forest, tracing the curves of a coastline, and learning the ancient names of rivers. While being present won’t stop things from disappearing, it does help slow down the erasure of meaning. 

Another answer is humility. Every place we know is just one snapshot in time. The desert I see today is not the same as the one from a century ago, nor will it be the same after I’m gone. To remember is to accept that we can never grasp the entire story. 

But above all, the answer is storytelling. Stories breathe life into vanished places in ways that maps or photographs simply can’t. When my grandmother shared her memories of skating on a frozen creek, she didn’t just paint a picture of ice; she conveyed a rhythm of life, a sense of belonging. When a refugee describes the scent of jasmine from her lost village, she preserves a piece of home that geography alone cannot capture. 

Storytelling comes with a sense of responsibility. Which narratives endure? Whose voices get the spotlight? Too often, the powerful overshadow the quieter stories. To truly remember, we need to listen broadly: to Indigenous names, to languages on the brink of extinction, to neighborhoods that have been erased in the name of progress. Each story adds depth to the fading map of our history. 

Maybe memory itself is like a living map—not one marked by roads and rivers, but by moments: where a child once played, where families gathered, where communities built something meaningful. This map would be ever-changing, vibrant with new additions and losses. 

Ultimately, remembering in a world that’s fading means embracing impermanence without succumbing to silence. It’s about mourning what’s lost, but also celebrating its existence, its impact on us, and its significance. The disappearing map isn’t just about loss; it’s also about connection. Every melting glacier, every forgotten town, every buried creek still leaves its mark on the people who once knew them. If we carry their stories forward, the map doesn’t disappear—it transforms, but it continues to live on.