The time came when there was no occasion for geography. The tides still lapped the shores like faithful lovers. We began to recognize that the birds had been talking to us all along. We forgot ourselves, and I learned to love my lungs again, and they learned to love the cold air. 

 

The time came when there was no occasion for geography, and we curled away our maps, pinning them closed with the arches of our rueful smiles. The ozone of satellites that spun around the globe became lifeless, and eventually drifted away into the outer darkness. Our cancers began to heal. We must assume these instances were unrelated. 

 

The time came when there was no occasion for geography. We didn’t have rulers of countries because countries became simple land mass. Boarders became obsolete. People built communities in the abandoned airports. Children played elaborate games of hide and seek in the luggage shafts.

 

It was during this time, when theological bodies uncurled themselves and wrapped around people’s tongues over firelight, that I found her. She was a release and an incision all at the same time. A splinter removed and a knowledge that I was now part of a devotion not even death could release me from. I was right about the death part. She disappeared. I asked her in the morning as she tied her stiff laces together and wrapped her hair in her fist where she was going. ‘North,’ she said. And how could she be more specific than that? North was as specific as the circumstances allowed. 

 

Light lost its efficiency after she’d gone. The low sun did not warm my skin. I saw no point in the sun’s burning ascent and descent. The land came and went like slow blinking. My breasts and neck ached for all the caress they did not receive. I was a piano living in a land of people who’d had their hands cut off, and I had not known my own music before her touch. 

 

One night I drank and wandered into the moorland without my bag. I fell asleep and dreamt that I sliced a knife through everything. I looked down into the cool pool of memories we’d made, my hands gripped on the rim and slid down into its cool blue. I held a scalpel in my hand. I thought of her. Quietly, I carved open her smile to see what caused it. I used my fingers to prod and poke about the cavernous mouths, shone a torch up into her brains, watched the lies and desires swim around in a galactic mess. I cut open her furrowed brow to see what was wrong, but the face fell away and showed me too much. I slashed open the chest I used to lay my cheek against, stepped into the warm wet darkness, and pulled the severed folds closed again behind me. I lay curled there for four days, or was it a year? I heard her voice and had to push my blade against my temple and swivel it, watching memory and dust fall out of my head onto my feet, her promises and love whispering over each other. I woke in sweat, my fists stiff from the cold. I had not known my own music before her touch.

 

I went south, with my shoes, tent and tin of fish, knowing that if I walked far enough, eventually we’d meet again, that the globe would cleave our paths over its dome until we walked once more towards one another. Only then could I reach my utopia. This was not an occasion for geography. This was an unexpected occasion for faith in gravitational pull.