Mapping Us

What would a map of my relationship with my first love look like? How big of a territory would it be, how many rivers, mountains, plains, valleys, beaches? What about the roads—where do they come from, enroute where? Some two-lanes became highways over the years, and some aren’t even footpaths anymore. Our topography would challenge the most talented cartographer.

It was definitely a mountaintop beginning—you in corduroy, me in cotton jersey, in my church, then literally in the mountains, at Windy Gap, where everyone thinks we had our first kiss. We know better, know it was just on the other side of that precipice—like downhill skiing into that afternoon in the snow, airborne in your arms, lost in your lips all afternoon. Getting to that first afternoon we made love was work, cross-country up small inclines and a vast plain after the exhilaration of that first flight not touching earth.

And then the snow all melted, both of us sick, quarantined in separate caves for months before emerging on separate edges of the same valley, you taking the sunny meadow while I climbed over rocks and swam downstream in the river, dancing for you every time you came down for a drink.

The desert had you next, while I swam on beaches and in natural springs, dug down into the soft sand before running back to the mountains while you were sent to a war zone and found cities afterward, when I came home from my first round of adventures. I will always remember the train trestle; you caught me when it really mattered.

We kept finding each other again, in downtown bars and historic apartments, parking lots, Chick-fil-A, and suburban doorways, neighborhood watering holes, and always each other’s arms.

Our roads had a major junction, produced a spur, yet still took us in different directions: you back to the bright lights and big city, me into universities and small coastal towns that know how to keep the hotels and condos out, and then winter came.

We huddled together when we found each other out there on that frozen lake when the world ended. I felt the ice crack out there in the middle, but when I reached for you, you took off with such force that it broke clean, submerging me there under the ice, unable to find the spot where it fell apart, where I could climb back up.

I suppose search and rescue found me, no idea where you got off to, and my road led me home, with a short detour on a lake for a battery of hurricanes ending with Katrina destroying New Orleans and me moving home once more.

After I settled into a comfortable neighborhood in a single family home with my family, you came back from off the map and merged back onto the highway, but you spun out in fantasyland while I continued along reality road with all of its potholes and bridges out, eventually making my way to my own city, finding another river, another mountain, several lakes, and a life I can live among trees and small towns with personalities and cultures of their own.

Fire! Fire on the mountain! Fantasyland didn’t provide a truck, but grudgingly allowed one volunteer firefighter to help me get the blazes under control before the flames put the whole map up in smoke. Again, catastrophe brought us together. Everyone got burned, and fantasyland didn’t survive the ensuing explosion, the dollhouses with everything just so shaken beyond recognition when careless digging hit a gas line and blew it all to smithereens, then launched a missile at my city in retaliation for the act of god clause in the insurance policy, the realization that damages would not be paid. So damages were made. I’m safe on my mountain by my river, if a bit cut off from my city, and I’m not sure where the fallout will lead you, perhaps to a new map entirely, with places and views you’ve never dreamed of.