Maps

I had a map of the world once. A really big map, with all the countries of the world well-detailed and color-coded.

It took up a whole section of my shoddily decorated bedroom wall in my first attempt at a post-college Brooklyn apartment -- and then filled the overwhelming white space above the secondhand couch in the living room of my shoddily decorated attempt at a couple-dedicated Brooklyn apartment.

It was a present. Possibly the best present I got at that time of my life.

I loved it.

Since childhood I have had a fondness for maps. I used to collect them from copies of National Geographic Maganize, which in middle school seemed like the most sophisticated and exciting magazine on the planet.

It was glossy, and full of big print hinting at magical places and things around the world, and they would give you free maps of places my middle-school mind could not really contemplate.

During high school, among the posters of forgettable movies I ganked from my job at the local cinema, photo montages of mostly myself and glued-together puzzles I for some reason felt motivated to hang on my wall, I had an odd collection of maps gathered from hastily devoured copies of National Geographic.

I remember distinctly a map of Ontario, another of central America, which in my post-modern college phase I graffittied during a late-night giggle fest with my little sister with a permanent-ink marker pen in order to identify exactly what part of the mysterious region from which the stereotypical 25th century Native American Star Trek Voyager crewman hailed.

I can't exactly remember what motivated me to do this, but I have a distinct memory of drawing the words "Chakote [sic] Belt " on a region approximate to Guatemala.

When I was younger and still collecting experiences like little pieces of lint, I would put little pin pricks on the places I'd been, which seemed much more interesting than the scene of cars and street lamps and infuriately mundane tract housing outside my Topeka bedroom window.

After a while I got tired of defacing the world with an ink-smudge of myself, and just wanted to look at the planet whole. To have a view of all things, terrestrial at least, is a comforting feeling.

You can almost see yourself in it, use it as a way of keeping track of exactly where you at any moment.

I abandoned many things when I left New York -- my cat, my hoard of assorted kitchen implements collected from Midwest garage sales, to-do lists, winter wear and torn fishnets, crestfallen ambitions for social justice and a career, people I loved, subway staircases I groggily trudged up daily, Batman and Legos and homemade t-shirts. Too many things to count, and which seem now pointless to catalog.

I miss my map though. Something about it made me feel balanced, and like the world was there for me to explore.

I'm pretty sure that map isn't coming my way anytime soon.

But I now have a new map now -- freshly resurrected from the bowels of storage and posted on my previously very blank wall.

A reproduction of the world before all the edges were defined -- where North America was still just a jagged coast and a shapeless hinterland, where the southern polar region had been unfortunately, and I assume briefly, dubbed Magallanica, and the tiny little island on which I currently live had not yet lived down first impressions -- this world is not one on which I can easily and concretely place myself.

It is old and, undefined and surprisingly accurate, and full of possibility.

It was also, fittingly enough, printed by National Geographic.