She doesn't map the cities. She maps the spaces between them.
Her charts show no roads, no mountains, no coastlines. Just the gaps — the regions where civilization ran out of reasons to go, the valleys that served no purpose, the stretches of nothing between one place and another. Her maps are mostly white.
People find this strange. They ask: what use is a map that shows you nothing?
She says: every map shows nothing. A city map shows streets and buildings — it doesn't show the air between buildings, the silence between words spoken on those streets, the moment after a door closes and before anyone notices it's closed. A map is always a selection of what's there. I've selected differently.
Her most requested map is of the Atlantic. What she's mapped is the place where both coastlines' influence runs out — the region where you are, measurably, between. It's a long, thin band of nothing, different in winter than summer, shifting by a few miles depending on the year. She found it by sailing into it with instruments that measured signal strength from both sides.
When the signals dropped to equal, she marked it.
She says the band feels different. Not dangerous. Just uncommitted. You could be going either direction. The water doesn't know yet.
Her second most requested is a map of a conversation — not what was said but where the pauses were. Where both speakers stopped. She made it from a transcript of a negotiation in 1962 that almost ended differently. The pauses are dense near the end. Two men, separated by an ocean, each holding the silence before the next word.
The gaps were where the decision lived.