Cartography, Short Story

Cartography

I’m building a map of my apartment. Not just the physical obviousness of it, 400 nondescript square feet, but also a detailed, physical cartography of every memory each space of floor provides. I’m mostly done with the living room so far, meticulously cordoned off into one-foot sections with thin strands of twine, like an archeological excavation of something past and buried. I stand over each, page open in the book, and think of whatever comes to mind in that particular spot. Standing over it, I sketch its outline, and enhance the details of whatever I think conveys the specific connotations of whatever occurred in that one spot. The large L shape dent where the heavy kitchen phone broke when I threw it.

Dividing the living room into measured squares took most of one long day. The paper is graph paper, to keep everything proportionate, and I’ve filled 97 pages so far. One square of apartment per page, 83 more and I’ll need a new book. A little more than three books, 180 pages each, and I’ll have the whole place plotted. It occurred to me that my graph pad was one and a half feet tall by one and a half feet wide. If I was to tear the pages of my notebook and lay them out, my end result would be a 600 square foot map of my 400 square foot apartment. Enlarged to show detail.

It still makes sense to me, 97 pages in. I’ve lived here for four years, and mapping begins to have some significance. It’s an old building, 80 years maybe, but how many people have spent four years here? Only a few, likely, and how many have found, have looked for and found, such significance? My history here was uncharted, under-preserved. Details would be forgotten, significance would be lost if this effort wasn’t taken. In history, whenever anything has been explored, has been discovered, it would next be mapped. In the footsteps of every conquering army or intrepid explorer came the cartographers, making sure all gains would be substantiated, sustained.

If I was to leave, or be removed, the majority of my personal experiences here in the past 4 years would immediately erased or gradually forgotten. When the thought occurred to me, I was almost panicked, but I feel much better about it now, prepared. Now, with very little reason to leave, I have hardly left at all since beginning the map. That was about two weeks ago. I’m finding more then I imagined I would. Only today, I was drafting a spot on the wood of the floor, between the rugs, where a patch of faded scratch marks had made their way into the oak. This is exactly where I used to have the couch, I was reminded. Feeling the grooved pattern on the floor, I reflected on any specific times I might have moved the couch, or caused the couch to move, of how the apartment had seemed before the couch; how I used to have a mattress in this very spot for the first two months I lived here, out in the living room without money for furniture. I had remembered being new here, with my one cheap mattress with nice sheets, two months falling asleep in the middle of it, lowering myself to bed. And once, sharing it, lying awkwardly off to one side and staying self-consciously awake throughout all of one long night. I had forgotten this, and, in drawing, in standing over thinking, contemplating on details, realized how much I had forgotten, and that if I didn’t take the effort to preserve my past, no one else ever would.

There are portions of the map which I have completed which were essential to draft a comprehensive diagram, but were not individually captivating, the vast majority of general landscape with an ordinary memory or two. There are squares that I have finished which are very important, and others I have not yet reached that I keep thinking of.

At the corner of the rectangle outcropping I am drafting near the window, a black marker line on the wall. It took me a while, took me a long time staring to try to remember why there was a two-inch line, what personal circumstance would have caused it. I have never been that height in this apartment. I have never measured to hang a picture, not with such a quick black streak. I have never drawn anything against this wall. I had given up, had halfheartedly started sketching the outline of the preceding square, unadorned or unmarked, still standing at the spot when it occurred to me. The calendar that used to hang there, those first few months only. Upon examination, I could see the small pinhole where the calendar had hung from the wall. I didn’t mark it all the time, rarely, actually, so it must have been something. From its distance to the nail, I knew it was a middle of the month. October, November, or December only, that first winter with the calendar, living mostly in this one room. End of the week, obviously, a Saturday to run off the calendar and onto the wall. Enthusiastic. Not work related. The second or third Saturday, in one of a handful of months exactly four years ago. I can’t remember what, but still feel the excitement of a discovery that would be meaningless, indiscernible to anyone else’s efforts. I am my own archeologist, discovering the Pompeii of my past, irretrievably gone, but frozen at exactly the moment of its demise. These were all moments of someone’s life, and that life was mine.

On the wood trim differentiating the living room from half kitchen, a green mark against the wall where the Christmas tree tipped, while I was steadying it not quite one year ago. I lift up my pant leg to examine a small crooked line down my shin where the jagged metal stand cut into me at the same time it went against the wall, our matching scars. It helps me feel connected to this place, bonded.

When I am working, the front of my thoughts are put to the task at hand, drawing each square the way you smooth over a jigsaw piece before you snap it into place. I think of what comes to mind in each square, but I keep thinking, the whole time, of the squares still to draw, of the pieces I’m most afraid of losing.

The mark on the right side of the doorframe from the entry hall, where I brought my first bed in, a large cracked triangle where the grey of plaster is visible. Humble, the bed still seemed too big at the time. Too much for myself, or for me to carry alone, still new here and without friends to help, moving its awkward weight around the corner in heaving pulls from the front. The mark on the left side of the doorframe where I took the same bed out, two year later for something a little nicer, this time with the help of someone else to navigate it around the turns. A small white dent against the paint, barely there.

The light blue spattering of paint in a color I’ve never liked, for a piece of furniture now gone, by the other wall in the bedroom. Brown rings of diffusion on the bedroom windowsill where cheap tea candles burnt down to their tin bases by the window, which, in Summer was full of one large tree and a breeze that would come in and cool everything off as we slept. A small hardened stain of glue and the adhesive bottom of duct tape, by the front door from another project I had started and never finished. Not yet, anyway. Tiny darkened scars in the small wood floor of the kitchen where I always dropped the knives I would toss when cooking.

The square outline of dirt on the floor of the hallway separating the kitchen from the living room where the stereo would play records I initially found charming, and then passable, until eventually I grew to memorize and loathe them, hating every single note just seconds before it would play. I think of drawing the vanity and small desk where I keep expecting them to be, but do not. This is to be a map of what’s still here, a map that will define myself.


Two yellow diagonals of tape in the hallway, still holding small corners of paper where something had been taken down in a hurry. Something recent. Several small fine scratches and a faint indication of blood not yet scrubbed in the bedroom from where a picture frame had been broken, when it had taken me days to get to cleaning up the glass from the floor, and the small shards had ripped imperceptible tears in me, staining my white socks in small imperfect red circles.

The spot on the floor by the door where I saw her leave, the spot by the phone where I first knew she wouldn’t be coming back, the spot on the couch where I told myself I wouldn’t care. The window by the wall where knowing what I had done became important.

There’s no exact instance when I realize a square is done. No spot yet has been all about one thing only. I start on something, the obvious markings, the indications of use and history, and so much else comes to mind. I try to separate it, to see what is the space itself, what actually is and actually happened without putting my own perspective on it, but I can’t. I spend an hour just looking, staring at a corner in an empty room by my feet, and I am overwhelmed. With reflection, I have become self-absorbed. Everywhere I look, I find full of myself, full with my own intention, my own stained experience. There’s no evidence of anything not stitched together with the thread of myself, and I know there’s no one else’s world I exist in but my own now, no one else keeping track if I don’t. Symbols become larger than the things themselves. The things I end up doing not nearly as important as what they mean.