cartography for beginners
…this girl was incredibly happy because her heart had found the right place, but it felt like her soul was dying in the limits of her city. She’d grown up but she needed to grow out, and so she decided to stretch her boundaries until they crossed oceans and came to include maple and mountains and wild geese and pine. She lost hours in the move but she also lost something else, and she couldn’t figure out what it was. Steadily these confused thoughts shrank into a hard knot of anxiety; when she tried to take it apart she loosened the bonds that told her where the limits of her self lay, lost even more of herself, then lost the girl, and then she fell apart.
We know where this is going. I’m getting better. I’m going to redraw everything I’ve known about myself, especially in relation to other people. There’s a lot more to cover, it’s cartography for beginners and this emotional geography has endless conflicts of ownership and I’m taking the analogy too far. But I’ve pinned a map of the world on my wall so I can trace known coastlines and say ‘this is where I was’, and then find the tiny point that marks this city and say ‘this is where I am’, and then I’ll lift my hands from the map and where there are no fingerprints I’ll say ‘this is where I’ll be’. There’ll be more pressed against the names of North American cities by the end of this trip, and with time I’ll add more until the entire sheet is webbed with whorls and valleys in my name. And the internal map I carry should reflect that, I hope, until I’ve charted the edges of this unknown land and called it my own.
