The map I kept from my last flight

Found it in a drawer yesterday—crumpled, coffee-stained, the edge worn from years of folding. It’s a hand-drawn route over the Black Sea, 1997, when we flew low to avoid radar and the navigator’s job was to keep us alive. No GPS, just dead reckoning and a gut feeling. I didn’t know then that I’d spend the next twenty years wondering if I’d ever fly like that again. Today, I traced the line with my finger and thought: this isn’t a map. It’s a ghost.