The Itinerary That Was Already Written

By Dawn Visionary

Last week I sat on my bedroom floor with an open suitcase and a list I had rewritten four times. I was packing for a solo backpacking trip through Europe, the kind of trip I have talked about for years and only recently let myself actually plan. My apartment in Seattle was a mess of wool socks, train passes, and a paper map I bought because I wanted to feel the fold lines of a road that was not mine yet. At the bottom of my closet, beneath the winter boots, I found a journal I had never seen before. It was my grandmother's. The cover was soft from handling and the spine was taped twice. I opened it expecting recipes or grocery lists. Instead I found dates, city names, and her small careful handwriting describing a journey across Europe she took when she was almost exactly my age. I read it standing up, then sitting down, then lying flat on the floor with the suitcase digging into my

ribs. Page after page, she had gone to the places I had circled on my own map. Paris. A hostel with a red door. A cathedral she called 'the one with the quiet floor.' Between two pages, pressed flat and brown at the edges, was a flower. It was the same kind I had picked up in a park the day before and tucked into my coat pocket, because I liked the color and had no better reason than that. ## The Journal at the Bottom of the Closet I have always been a person who notices small gifts. A pink sunrise over the Seattle skyline will make me write three lines of poetry before I have had my tea. A hidden mural in an alley can hold me still for twenty minutes. A rooftop garden I found by taking the wrong stairwell once felt like a private audience with the sky. So when the journal appeared, my whole body said the same word: yes. This was a sign. The universe was guiding my journey, and it had

chosen my grandmother's handwriting to deliver the message. My hands were shaking. I called my mother and read her three entries in a row without pausing for breath. That night I could not sleep. Not from excitement, exactly. Something underneath the excitement was tapping on the floorboards, and I did not want to answer it. ## What Grandmother Left Out Here is what I did not want to look at: the gaps. Grandmother's journal is not a continuous story. There are four missing days between one city and the next. There is a page torn out at the seam, the ragged edge still visible. And on the fifteenth page there is a sentence that does not fit the happy rhythm of the rest. She wrote, in the same steady hand, that she had been afraid she had made a mistake, and then she never mentioned it again. I am an innocent by nature. That is not an insult I will pretend does not sting, and it is not a

costume I put on for company. When I look at the world I look for the pattern that says the world is kind, that the signs are real, that grace arrives on schedule. My shadow is the part of me that would rather read a journal as a promise than read it as the record of a woman who was frightened and went anyway. The pressed flower had been beautiful when she picked it. By the time I found it, it was a brown ghost of itself, still soft enough that I was afraid to breathe near it. That feels like the honest image. Signs survive, but they do not survive unchanged, and the person who picks them up is never the person the sign was meant for. ## Signs Are Invitations, Not Instructions For years I read synchronicity as a guarantee. If the card fell right, if the number appeared twice, if a stranger said the exact word I needed, then the choice ahead of me was already blessed and I could stop

worrying about it. It was a beautiful way to live, and it let me off the hook in a way I am only now willing to name out loud. A sign is an invitation, not an instruction. My grandmother's journal tells me the road exists. It does not tell me to take it, and it certainly does not promise the road will be kind. It tells me that a woman with my hands once stood in a train station at six in the morning and chose to keep going, or chose to stop for a day, or chose to write nothing down because writing it down would have made it true. The same logic holds for my anthology. When the boutique publisher wrote to say yes to my collection of Pacific Northwest poetry, I wanted to hear it as proof that I had been chosen. What actually happened is that I sent out work for months, rewrote the same three poems until I could not see them anymore, and showed up to open mics in bookstores where eleven

people clapped and nine of them were other poets. The universe did not do that part. I did that part. The yes was an invitation to keep doing it. ## The Itinerary I Will Have to Write Myself So I sat back down with the suitcase and the map, and I made a decision that felt smaller and braver than any sign I have ever received. I would go, and I would leave room in the plan for the days that go wrong. I would write down the city names my grandmother wrote down, and then I would let myself get lost on purpose between two of them. I started a new notebook, the first page empty and waiting. I did not press the flower into it. I put the flower back where I found it, between her pages, because it was hers and I am not ready to take everything she left and call it mine. Instead I wrote one line at the top of my own first page: 'You do not need to be certain, only willing.' I do not know yet

whether my grandmother would agree with that. I hope she would. I hope she wrote something like it somewhere in the four missing days, and simply chose not to leave it for me to read. ## Closing Reflection I am still learning the difference between a sign and an alibi. It is the most useful thing I have learned this year, and I learned it from a taped spine and a torn page. The universe is generous with invitations. It is generous with pink sunrises, hidden gardens, and strangers who play cello in a market for no money at all. It is stingy with certainty, and I am beginning to suspect that is a kindness rather than a cruelty. If you are waiting for the sign that will finally make your choice safe, I want to be honest with you the way I am trying to be honest with myself. The sign is not going to make the choice for you, and no amount of synchronicity will carry the suitcase. But when you

finally do the thing, the signs will show up at the edges of it, small and brown and pressed flat, and they will mean more than they ever could have meant before.