Some people come into this life with an innate sense of direction. They can always tell which way is East or Southwest. I am not one of those people, but I didn’t know this until the end of my first day of kindergarten.

My older sister and I had walked together up The Path that morning. The Path was a paved stretch of hill that wound through a swath of woods up to the grounds of Northeast School. The foot of The Path was about two blocks from our house. It was only a ten minute march from our front door to Mrs. Wozenski’s kindergarten, which was the first classroom on the left by the front entrance of the school.

When Mrs. Wozenski excused us at noon, I clutched my metal Mickey Mouse lunchbox and made my way to freedom with my classmates. Once out the door, I turned right and followed the sidewalk to an opening in a chainlink fence. Stepping just outside the fence, I found myself in very strange territory. And I was alone.

I’m not sure how long I stood balanced on that unknown edge of the world, but something turned me around, so that I faced the familiar woods in the distance on the other side of the school. Then I ran and ran in the opposite direction, down the sidewalk that straddled both ends of the universe, until it intersected with another street, which in turn intersected with the top of The Path. The asphalt there was uneven and I tripped and fell, hitting myself in the head with my lunchbox. It had never occurred to anyone that I would not know my way home. But I got there, arriving late and slightly concussed, with a skinned knee.

At Geraldine’s birthday party in the second grade, each of us kids was blindfolded, handed a paper tail with a sharp pin pierced through it, twirled around and around and shoved in the direction of a large drawing of a tailless donkey. It was enough to get anywhere near that donkey, let alone pin the tail on the ass’ ass. Dizzy and disoriented, I ended up on the other side of the basement, where I stabbed Geraldine’s brother’s lifesize poster of Roman Gabriel dead in the eye.

One day in the fifth grade, we were asked to draw a map of our classroom and label the four cardinal points. I sketched the room with its blackboard and rows of desks and drew an arrow at the top of the paper to indicate North. Up was North. Or maybe off the paper into the ceiling? Mr. Lumpkin assured me that neither guess was correct. Everyone else in the class seemed to know that North was out the window where the playground was.

Each of us humans lands on the planet with no definitive chart or compass and is expected to find his or her way. Yet, even someone with the most highly magnetic sense of direction could never navigate the map of the universe. We are fragile vessels of starlight and salt, brimming with North, South, East and West and every possibility, spun into an earthly crossroads of time and space. But it is only here at the centre of this cosmic X, that we can ever really know where we are.

Sometimes, racing back towards the woods is the only way home. Often times, it will feel as though you are spinning and running all by yourself. And ultimately, you will have to schlep your own lunchbox.

It would be another year or so beyond that first day of kindergarten before I could read any street sign. It would be many more years before I realised that the street that intersected with The Path that led me home was called Felice—Happy Road.