Model opening (approx. 270 words):

The first time I was properly lost, I was nine years old and standing in the middle of a department store, surrounded by coats.

I remember the coats more than anything: a forest of them, hanging at exactly the height of my face, smelling of wool and new plastic. I remember turning in a slow circle, certain that if I turned enough times the world would click back into place and my mother would appear at the end of an aisle. She did, after about four minutes that lasted roughly a year. But something had shifted. I had discovered that the world did not automatically arrange itself around me, and that the ground I stood on could, without warning, become unfamiliar.

I have been thinking about that forest of coats lately, because I realized I cannot remember the last time I was lost. Not truly lost. A blue dot on my phone tells me where I am at every moment, and a calm voice tells me where to turn. I am never more than a few taps from certainty. This is, by any reasonable measure, a good thing; I have no wish to return to standing on street corners turning a paper map upside down. And yet I find myself wondering whether something has gone missing along with the possibility of going missing: whether, in never being lost, we have also stopped being found.

A map can tell you where you are. It cannot tell you why you came. Perhaps that is the question getting lost used to ask us, and the one we have quietly stopped answering.