My cousin Delbert left Chatham County in 1981 and has not been back. Last month, for reasons he did not fully explain, he drew a map of our hometown from memory and mailed it to me. It is a remarkable document. It is also almost entirely incorrect.

He has the river on the wrong side of the mill. He has put the school where the cemetery is, which some would call a Freudian relocation. He remembers a diner that closed before he was born and omits the one where we ate breakfast every Saturday for a decade. And yet I recognized the town instantly, more surely than I recognize it from the accurate map the county publishes, because Delbert's map is not a map of the town. It is a map of what the town did to him, which is a different and more durable geography.

A place you have left stops being a location and becomes a story, and stories, unlike locations, are organized by meaning rather than by distance. The cemetery is where the school was because that is the emotional truth of having grown up and watched everyone age. The river is on the wrong side because the river was always, for him, the boundary of everything he intended to cross. Every map drawn from love is wrong in exactly the ways that matter most.