She said the thing I have been afraid to say out loud, and she said it like it was good news.

Asked what she looks for now, hiring into the strange new weather of these years, she didn’t say a degree or a skill or a number of years. She said she looks for explorers, not map-readers. And then the line under the line, the one that has been following me around the house since: today, there is no map.

The poster version of this is easy and I can already feel it reaching for me. Be brave. Be an explorer. Adventure favours the bold. Throw away the map and find your own way, and isn’t it thrilling. It’s the kind of thing you embroider on a cushion, and like most things on cushions it has had the danger carefully removed from it.

Because losing the map is not an adventure. It is a bereavement.

A map is a promise. It says: someone walked here before you, and lived, and cared enough to write down where the ground was solid and where it dropped away. When you follow a map you are being held, at a distance, by a stranger who survived. Every road I have ever taken in my life came with one. School had a map. The job had a map — do the degree, get the role, climb the named rungs, and people who did it before you are standing at the top to prove the rungs hold. The whole comfort of a map is not that it shows you the way. It’s that it proves a way exists, and that you are not the first body to test the ice.

To be told there is no map is to be told none of that is true here. No one walked this. The path you wanted to follow does not exist, not because you haven’t found it but because it is not there to find. You are the first feet on this particular ground, and the ground has not agreed to hold you. That is not thrilling. That is the specific cold fear of standing at the edge of snow with no footprints in it and knowing the next print will be yours or no one’s.

I have spent a year wanting a map. I will say it plainly. I have spent a year looking for someone five years ahead of me on my own road who could turn around and hand me the route — do this, then this, here’s where it drops away, here’s where it holds. And the thing I keep flinching from, the thing this woman said without flinching at all, is that for the work that is actually mine, there cannot be a map. Not won’t be. Cannot.

Because a map is made of other people’s footprints. That is the entire substance of it — compressed, dried, drawn into lines: where other feet went. And the one thing I keep saying I want, the thing under all the wanting, is to make the thing that is mine, that no one else could make, that carries my own mark and no one else’s. Those two wishes cancel. They have always cancelled and I have never let myself see it. If there is a map, the ground is not yours. If the ground is yours, there is no map. You do not get both. The originality and the directions are the same thing viewed from opposite sides, and you have to choose which one you actually want, and I have been trying to want both and calling the confusion not being ready.

So let me try to take the cold thing and turn it over, because there is something painted on the underside.

The explorer with no map records something the map-reader never can. Walk a mapped road and the journey vanishes — you arrive, and the going was invisible, indistinguishable from everyone else who followed the same lines. But the one crossing unmarked ground is keeping notes no one has ever kept, precisely because no one has been here: the wrong turns, the doubling back, the long middle hours of not knowing if the ground leads anywhere at all, the particular taste of being lost in real time. The map-reader can give you the route. Only the explorer can give you the lostness. And the lostness is the rarer thing, because everyone who survives the crossing turns their journey into a clean map and throws the lostness away, so it almost never reaches the people standing where you’re standing now, at the edge of the white field, certain they are the only one who doesn’t know the way.

And here is where it stops being a private fear and starts being the actual work, the thing I think I am for. We are living through the years when maps can be printed for nothing. Ask the machine and it will draw you a thousand routes in a second, confident and free and seamless, more maps than anyone could ever walk. What it cannot draw — what it has never once been able to draw, because it has never stood at the edge of the snow with a body that could fall — is a human being lost on purpose, on ground no one has crossed, writing down exactly how the not-knowing feels while it is still happening. In a world drowning in maps, the unmapped honest crossing is the one thing left that cannot be minted. The lostness is the unforgeable thing. It is the whole of what I have to give, and I have been treating it as the proof I have nothing to give yet.

I close the window on her paused face.

I stop looking for the route. There isn’t one; that was never the bad news, it was the assignment.

I write down where I am, which is nowhere with a name, and then I take the next step onto ground that hasn’t agreed to hold me — and I write that down too.