Six Maps

From the book The Agile Rabbit Book of Historical and Curious Maps, the attached cd rom of which contains all the maps "for design purposes", and which I am totally excited about pirating.

Hooray!

Standard / Song

Suddenly it is Feburary.
The city is still swept in wind. He is looking from the balcony outside his room, across the suburbs and the river, across the thick spread of box trees and jacarandas, to the city, the five visable skyscrapers bared like baby teeth.

The school holidays are over and so he is no longer working full-time. He has been unpacking boxes full of books, and filled the shelves with their glorious spines. He is reading again, in the bedroom which is usually his mother's study, the bedspread pooled with late afternoon sunlight. The house is big and tall and empty, his parents away down south. He remembers that he has been forgetting to feed the fish, and is glad that they are still alive. He puts off going to bed for so long, to make the day stretch out, to just keep on continuing, until he can't take it anymore and slides into the cold depths of the bed, and his back sighs in relief and he wonders why he didn't just do this earlier, it feels so good. He cooks with store-bought sauces. He rides. He drives, with too much engine-rev in each start up. There are platinum blonde girls with big sunglasses sitting like dark moons over their eyes, alone, in cars behind or beside him. They are everywhere, these girls. There are plans being made and unmade. The plans include putting off the masters degree (with it's unweildy seminar times) and making the most of wide roads and young minds. There will be free airflights to the Philippines, for a week-long workshop in April, and Colombia and the United States in July. There, there will be a roadtrip, involving at least four states, and he has already bought a map, each state a spill of pastel colour hatched and crammed with roads and small towns. His finger marks the route, and makes deviations and extentions, into Canada, into the regions of Ohio with nothing but plantations of buckwheat and soy. He knows he cannot afford these extra segments, that they are impossible, but his finger and his mind won't stop.

But there must be more than all this. There just must. He knows this: that to let a whole year be washed away with the need to "find ones feet" and to let it be engulfed by the approach and then the memory of a few months in the Americas, especially a year right now, a year of comparitive youth, a year he will never in the slightest way get back, that, he knows, would be an unforgivable crime. And so it is this gap, this flirtatious emptiness which finds itself draped before him, this annual canvas - this wonderful year - this, he realises, must become both his standard and his song.