Read aloud — generated voice
She was given the map at seventeen, folded into eighths, soft at the creases from being opened by someone else's hands.
Every road on it led somewhere she had already been. That was the trouble with maps drawn by people who loved you: they only ever charted the places they had survived, and marked everything else as water.
The Roads That Were Drawn
There was the road to the school her mother had gone to. The road to the church at the end of the valley. The road to the house she would live in, which had been chosen before she was born and had a bedroom the exact shape of her future.
And there was the town, drawn in the middle in confident ink, with a small hand-lettered word beneath it.
Home.
She traced it so often the paper wore through, until home was a hole you could see the table through.
What Was Left Off
She left in the spring, with the map in her coat pocket, because you do not throw away the only chart you have been given even when you have decided not to follow it.
Three countries later she took it out on a bench in a city that was not on it, and understood the thing she had been circling for years: the map was not wrong. It was simply finished. It had been drawn by someone who had stopped travelling, and it ended where they had stopped.
A map is not a promise. It is a record of where someone else was brave enough to go.
She did not throw it away. She folded it back into eighths and put it in the drawer, and she started the slow work of drawing her own — the one where the roads run out into blank paper, and the blank paper is not marked here be nothing but simply left open, because she has not been there yet.
The old map still points to the place she left. It always will. That is what it is for.