A Map in the Closet

I was wading through the personality of my mother’s closet when I saw the map. It was folded gently, set aside amidst a pile of books and pajamas. My gaze lingered there, as I’m sure my mother’s gaze has done many a time, so I unfolded the map with my eyes and turned away. I knew what I would find chartered on its leaves.

A land.

A foreign, distant, ancient, mysterious land.

China.

I rummaged a while more, no longer focused on the task at hand (finding a flannel), thinking. Some day, soon, I will seep into that distant land, and my mother will be in this closet. She will sweep her fingertips across cotton, silk, denim, but somehow they will find their way to the map. She will pick it up and stare, and it will stare back at her. And her fingers will touch, with her heart and eyes and prayers, a black dot on the map where I might be at that very moment. She may pause, and listen, in the silence of that dot and that closet, and then resume her day of green scrubs and drowsy needles and people in need of Healing. The moment will have passed, and the map will simply remain a map, folded gently amidst a pile of books and pajamas.

And I will be 7099 miles away, and I will know that I am loved.

Let the adventure begin.

“That thou canst not stir a flower

Without troubling of a star”

- Francis Thompson