She kept a map in her
bag she had never once
opened, folded so many
times the creases had
turned white. Some
afternoons she sat on the
park bench and unfolded
it anyway, pretending the
lines still led
somewhere.
It didn't matter that
the places were wrong.
What mattered was the
ritual of it — the
paper warming in her
hands, the promise that
a route existed, even if
she had forgotten how to
read it.
She was not lost, she
decided. She was just
between the place she had
been and the place that
hadn't named her yet.