Transfixed by Maps
I am transfixed by maps, colorful, blue and pink and pale green, black lines tracing the paths I will never take. Mountain ranges rising from the surface, where you can run finger down and imagine all the towns, all the places where you could go and make your life better. Maps are like words, the anecdotes to describe my life. I give a one-dimensional, flat portrait of myself, using sentences and guesses about myself. I map out my existence. But like the maps themselves, the stories create a verisimilitude which has nothing to do with reality. See this line? this black highway running toward the West? You can follow that line all the way and never imagine the flat fields and endless roads.
I can tell you where I came from, what classrooms I sat in, where I drank my coffee and even who I kissed and what he said, and my sentences are merely black lines running into my past, a past whose richness I could never explain with black lines, a place you can’t even imagine. My mother’s house, her porch and yard and the roads leading to it amounting to only a dot. I pull myself farther and farther from the earth, I see longitude and latitude, it was here, I could even point my finger here where I left him behind, my heels kicking up the dust of the road. Horizontal lines, vertical lines along the earth, forming a mesh, a net to catch the past in.
-From Theresa’s journal, 9/17/1989
Image: Two of Theresa’s journals and a few of the contents clipped to the pages.
See Theresa’s blog The Wit of the Staircase