Infinity feather with quote design

The map came back from the printers with the loop wrong again. Mr Okafor says the copperplate is fine and the ink is fine, it is the sea that will not sit still, and he has taken to calling it my infinity. I have stopped correcting him. Every chart I draw now has a figure eight somewhere in the margin, the way you used to scribble feathers across the back of your school atlas.

The old one Father left, the one with the wind rose burned at its corner, I found in the drawer under the tide tables. Someone had written across the south of it in pencil, in a hand I knew before I knew it was yours: not all who wander are lost. You were nine and had copied it from a calendar, and you thought it was about you. I thought it was a lie then, because you had gone missing on the way back from the chapel and Mother walked the lanes until midnight with a lamp.

I am not writing to tell you to come home. I am writing because the feather you drew on the corner is still there, and I have started to think you were right about the loop. Life runs into love and comes back round to where it started, and the only thing that breaks the circle is someone who stops looking at the map. I have put the chart in the post with the feather pointing east. If you are lost, you will know which way to walk.

Your sister, Ada