The Map + the Territory
It’s not the unknown that undoes you. It’s the known that walks you into walls.
There was once a woman who organized the world into what she was sure of.
This was not arrogance. It was architecture, an archway of keeping the ceiling up. She stacked certainties the way you stack good dishes: carefully, in the order you may need them. She knew the weight of particular griefs, which rooms, how someone’s voice changes when they’ve made a decision but haven’t told you yet.
Well. She had something bronzed. Kept it and called it knowledge. And there rotting beneath the coating, a feeling, dressed up in the clothes of fact.
The fire of the lantern made everything amber, warmer than it was. She’d trusted the light instead of the hour. This is a very human error, to take the shape of a thing for its content.
Outside, the world continued its unremarkable revisions. A display of oranges restacked. A word she thought she understood used in a new sentence, meaning something else entirely. The bus arrived at the corner a minute earlier than expected. Small corrections, issued without announcement.
Inside, she was holding a map of a changed place.
It’s not the unknown that undoes you. The unknown arrives as itself: strange, requiring attention, asking nothing but presence. It is the known that walks you into walls, those room you’re certain you remember. The turn you take without looking. The one you think you’ve already understood.
She laid the map flat. It was a gorgeous drawing, every wisp of graphite placed with care. No longer accurate.
So she folded it and resisted the urge to throw it away. She’d need it or something like it later. A reference, not a ruling. She opened the door without checking which one first.
The day was already in the middle of itself. Already warm where it was going to be warm. Already indifferent in the places that didn’t know her name.
She stepped into it anyway, wearing her revised certainties like a lighter coat.
What she knew now: that knowing and being right are different countries. That she had spent time in one thinking it was the other.
She walked forward into what she had not yet been wrong about.
There was still, it turned out, quite a lot of it.
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