Go Long

Maps fill me with longing and life.  I love the geometries, the seas, the vast spans and slim isthmus spans.  I love the archipelagos.  I love the little islands, the horn, tierra del fuego.  It's my world, and I belong to it, and if it is as promised by the cartographer, I have a sense of entitlement to it.  When I told Nanu that we were young, and couldn't die, I was wrong.  She, as god would have it, died instantly in a car accident in California.  California is on my map, with rocket skies and thin aether, sparkling lights of red and green topping towers, stars dripping down between peaks of rough hewn geology, a land of desperation and dreams.

If I am elemental, I am probably wind.  The sea is my friend.  I can deal with the magic of fire.  Earth, though, is my contest.  She is so large, encompassing, and substantial I can only barely touch her.  My head is in the clouds.  I don't know, and am repelled by the grave.  When I pass cemetaries it makes me want to spend time with the dead, but I don't believe they are in those plots.  The world can have my clay, but my soul does not belong here.

Petitioning g-d, I want the same thing I wanted when I was too young to know.  I saw the shape of Brazil, and knew I needed to go there.  I saw Madagascar and the name meant, "come here."  Cyprus, New Zealand, and Patagonia all mine.  I would spin the globe, watching the U.S.S.R. wobble topheavy and long, beckoning me to Siberia.  Let me know these places.  I suspect that one can find magic anywhere, but I don't like bowling allies. 

The part that breaks me is space.  Can man claim more than we have here?  It's a sport, an art, a science to choreograph the physics necessary to shoot the moon, but to what end?  In a contradiction, I wonder what's wrong with the Earth.  Probably the piggishness, perhaps, the social desire to claim more, more more.  More land, better land, land for oneself.  The land isn't mine.  I don't want it.  I just want to cross this road, and just the once for now.