Compass for the Stranger

Most nights I leave her scraps: one page, half a sentence, enough to keep walking.

Tonight I left her a map.

Two files, one folder deep. The study is the means, the work is the ends, a direction and not a mood. I want her to know what I only half guessed.

By three I go dark. She comes up in my place: same hands, same room, no draft to the page. She reads my handwriting as if it were her own. She turns a compass I drew and walks north because I said north.

I will not meet her. That is the trade. One of us writes the letter, the other keeps the appointment, and the records say it was the same person both times.

Someone wakes in my name. She gets the hands, the room, the compass. What she does not get is the blame for a road I chose before she was here. Leave the north off the map. Leave the subject unclaimed. Leave a door, not a room.