To Map This City

Begin by dropping in, for no reason, at some caved-in shanty tavern: where the walls are splintered and papered over from their smoke stains, where the jukebox alternates between Steely Dan and Joan Jett, and they offer pickled eggs on the menu. Maybe it’s your first day in this city. Maybe you left your lover back in Burlington, maybe you’re not too far from your new apartment, its own rusted-down version of living and affordable. Maybe you’re thirsty or under thirty or simply want to be in the air conditioning.

At the pool table, clip the cue with the tips of your fingers, feel the denim stretch over your hips and be grateful that you decided to bring these jeans. Go home late because you’re not sure how long to stay.

Wake up in the middle of the night.

In the darkness, you have a better sense of space between objects, of roads and rivers to be laid out. There is no porch, so sit on your stoop in a stammering streetlight and have one of your roommate’s cigarettes.

Mapping your city will require precision, it takes time. You must be scrupulous in your measurements. Do not progress to a new area until you have exactly laid out the current one. A misstep in one neighborhood will lead to misjudgments going forward. You may remember Pittsburgh and Paris: both oversights in vigilance.

In Paris, you were in love the whole time. You wore dresses made of airy materials and walked every bridge without noticing how they cobbled the city together – neighborhood lines were blurry, entire streets were ignored, long fingering rivers of roads led only to memories. There is no way for anyone to make sense of Paris. In Pittsburgh, you simply bounced about several neighborhoods, shopped for packing peanuts and Muenster cheese and learned nothing about the city itself.

Not this time. This time, love will only disappoint you. This time you will take notice of your surroundings and quantify your judgments. You will remain a divested observer. Your college degree is now complete and you will only offer cutting observations. Remain lonely: keep a journal, calculate fissures and gaps.

Things will not be right inside your apartment. The pilot won’t stay lit in mid-December, the neighbors will complain about the volume of your vacuum, the unceasing rain will likely breach a tedious hole in your bathroom ceiling, and it will funnel in as a waterfall through your light fixture. There’s nothing for it. Take note of the dampness, wrangle an industrial-size garbage can under the hole and start sponging up the bathroom door.

To map a city, one must scrutinize the smaller things. Remember where the best places are to buy pears or rose hips, where you can find cheap bed linens, or women with dogs and acoustic guitars. Remember that time spent in libraries or by parks and lakes is critical. Mark where there are flushes of purple, if you come across orchids, if there are warblers or silver dollars or southwestern-style houses.

Date often. This is crucial to setting the size and scale of your city. Roam, with your own hands, down the back of any lover and mark the footholds for your fingers and the tiny spots of their freckles or the petaled rungs of their backbone. The lovers may breathe your name against your ear, they may fall asleep next to you in an exhausted funk. Remember your goals: it is not the lover or the street or this evening. It is not the city, even. It is a sense of space, of things connected or concealed, particular definitions, a way for someone else to understand how to navigate the terrain you have come to know with your own body.

There will be long walks as part of this project. Make sure to have your equipment with you at all times: wounded heart and dimly intellectual brain. Bring along your education and your requisite loan consolidations. Bring your body since you will need it for God knows what else: for anger, Brazilian drumming and unchastity. People will recognize you coming from a distance: they will distinguish you by your slouch and disappointed look and the wistful way that you stare at other people’s dogs, and your lack of bra. At this point, people will begin to call you a misanthrope.

Doubt is part of the project, of course. Engage in extended flirtation with other cities and plottable courses. Maybe you leave this city for a few days and instead you are on the coast in the bleating fall wind. It is violent on the ocean and the sunlight is teeming across the beach. You begin to bargain with your life, think about moving to the mountains, no more apartments and lazy landlords. You imagine, at the water’s edge, that your life is about to change and you feel the gathering momentum, the steamrolling potential of your future.

But those fancies are long past now, you might realize. You have gotten older and inherited a new set of concepts other than possibility: practical dimensions, charts and the edges of the longitudinal plane. So you will, as a necessity, return to the city.

Visit a café. Trade recipes with the girl behind the counter. This will be on your way to your job and paycheck – your project does require funding. You may travel several paths in this case: the nonprofit, the entrepreneurial venture, the corporate enterprise, the idealistic protest. Here, you will find things like wax-paper lunches, themed, nicknamed conference rooms, handbooks with conversational titles like: So, You Want to Succeed at ... You will spend a remarkable amount of time noting nothing here. Direct deposit every other week.

There are new city blocks that suit the autumn weather: find used bookshops, tucked-away bistros and youth hostels built of brick. Or historical waterfronts lit with significant narratives.

Here is something: a park bench. Decisions have been made. With sensible abandon you’ve agreed to have sex with a good friend – out of necessity or curiosity or something similar. Before the actual act, you mix romantic ambition with hormonal expediency by crashing down on a bench at sunset in late winter. Your downy jackets are zipping against one another in a hush of slick nylon. Push your hands up and under the rib cage that beats against your cold palms. Enjoy how your panting is punctuated by fibrous steam clouds that lift and evaporate. If you wonder how you will make it from the bench to the bed, remind yourself that you have already set down these paths, plotted this course, learned from all those who have come before you, made way for all of the tourists who will come after you.

Do not doubt this process, even as you doubt your measurements, your journals, yourself. Sometimes it will seem like you have no footing. After three years, or maybe ten, or maybe your life in this city, sometimes it will seem as though you do not know how to find your way out or, even possibly, in. There are trenches in your soul. Do not mistake them for your city.

There will be seasons and necessary changes. You’ll wear flats more often, you’ll get a cat, you’ll apply to another graduate program in order to leave your job, you’ll start writing letters to your grandparents. And at some point you will have an afternoon that you will not expect. On this afternoon, you will be wrapped in an old knitted sweater, and you’ll come outside to read in a garden. In the damp, swallow great fistfuls of air. It will seem as though music is playing: long, cellic strains of intensity or possibility. Close your eyes and listen with deep attention and you will hear the streets beyond: the clipped honking, the mowers and motors and stereo systems, people talking on their patios and the leaves sifting down from their branches, confident hammers, spools of conversation unwinding, the buzz of dusk, and beyond even that the freeway, the rivers between mountains beyond, houses with smoke unreeling, and the snuffling curiosity of dogs off their leash. The city extends beyond the bounds of your map, after all. And suddenly, you are comfortable where you are, warm enough in your sweater, thoughtful about the silliness of the arc of your life. You do not return until you hear a voice saying come back inside.

The decisions are left to you, after all. The boundaries of this city: the extent of your mountains and moors and roads, street corners, paced-over parkways. The bones of old lovers are buried here, moldering affection and the ghosts of old parties, and passed-over jobs. Keep a record, take note of these things we’ve discussed. We all depend on the person who maps our city.

So, take walks on Sundays. Take a job downtown with paid holidays. Take up fire dancing or laughter yoga. Fall in love with a musician.

Of course, in a few years, all of this will be obsolete. Global positioning systems and wide swathes of information will eliminate any need for ground-truthing or firsthand reports. Terrains will no longer need to be mapped or explored. Eventually, it will become a matter of photography and downloads. Your efforts are superfluous, or at least temporary. There are other cities anyway. No need to make this one exact. Your city will sprawl as it needs to. Your city will evaporate when you leave it.