A Map of What Stays

There isn’t a map for leaving home. Not really.

There are directions, sure—interstates and flight paths, the kind of routes that pull you away from everything familiar—but no one tells you how to find your way back, not to the place, but to the person you were when you left.

I used to think my map would be a straight line. You start in childhood, follow the arrows through each milestone, and arrive somewhere that feels like certainty. But mine looks more like a spiral. It doubles back on itself—through people I’ve loved and lost, cities that felt like promises, and the quiet rooms where I met myself again after both, before the cycle repeats.

Sometimes I trace it in my mind when I can’t sleep, which is most nights. It starts with the smell of rain that drifted through my childhood bedroom each night. Then it moves to the sound of my father’s laugh, the way he could fill a room with his booming cackle. It's the taste of spaghetti every Sunday, ironically the only thing my Italian mother always got right. There’s a point where the path darkens—a fork where the map tears a little. That’s the year I learned that love can stay and still change shape.

Every friendship, every heartbreak, every version of myself has left a mark, a contour line on the map of what stays. I’ve started to think that memory itself is the landscape—mountains of joy, valleys of silence, rivers that carry the things I tried to forget but couldn’t. The map doesn’t lead out anymore. It leads in. Each moment leads to the map of today, with hints of yesterday.

There are places I visit often: the summer I felt infinite, the winter I disappeared a little, the morning I decided to come back. Each time, I find something new there—a small landmark I missed before, a voice that sounds like forgiveness and clarity.

If you were to look at it, my map wouldn’t make much sense. There are a million street names that I'll never forget, and clear borders of remembrance. Fragments of songs that stir memories of the first time hearing them, hands I once held and either let go of or still hold to this day, the pulse of hope that keeps resurfacing even when I think it’s gone. But I can read it. I can follow it home. The question I ask is, where is home now?

Is it a map to childhood or a map to tomorrow? Can the taste of spaghetti on Sundays change? Will my dad's laugh never not boom from the room down the hall? What about the smell of rain? Think about it more, things can change and remain the same.

I can follow my mom's recipe and make her spaghetti on a Sunday, but it's not her hands that make it. I can call my dad and hear his laugh over the phone, instead of in the next room and avoid the dread I'll feel the day I can't make that phone call. The smell of rain is different depending on the place, but the feeling of rain on your skin? Infinitely unchanged.

Because the truth is, we’re never really lost. We’re just walking roads we haven’t named yet.