Redrawing the Self
At the centre of the lost house waits his own childhood room.
Beyond the last door there was no corridor, and no seventh crooked , and no chalk.
There was only a small room, low and square, with a window the size of a book.
He knew it at once, the way one knows a face before recalling a single name.
The wallpaper small blue ships, sailing nowhere, that he had counted himself to sleep by.
In the corner stood a child's bed, and beside it a lamp he had once feared.
This was his room, the first he had ever had, in a house long since sold.
He had not thought of it in thirty years, and so, quietly, it had vanished.
A room, he saw now, disappears not when it is demolished but when it is forgotten.
And he had forgotten this one , the way the busy forget the person they were.
He had spent his life drawing the lost rooms of strangers, and never once this one.
The cartographer of vanished rooms had, all along, been the largest vanished room of all.
He sat on the small bed, which held his adult weight without any word of complaint.
The house, he understood, had never been the grandmother's; the grandmother had been the house.
She was every of every room that waits, lit and patient, for its rememberer.
And the woman in mourning, who had never been born, was the self he had left .
Each of them was a version of the same quiet question: will you come back for me.
He took out his pen, because a cartographer answers questions only in the language of lines.
He began to the room, not as it had been, but as it still was.
Every line he set down seemed to make the walls around him a little more certain.
To draw a place, he finally understood, is to promise that you will not forget it again.
And to draw yourself is to the child you left sleeping under the blue ships.
The window brightened as he worked, admitting a light that no demolished house should hold.
He drew the lamp without fear this time, and the fear, unremembered, simply ceased to be.
He drew the door through which he had entered, and then, after a pause, did not draw it shut.
Some rooms, he wrote in the , are only lost until someone consents to need them.
His hand, drawing his own beginning, was steadier than it had ever been on any commission.
One line remained undrawn at the room's exact centre, and he knew what it would be.