I am two hundred and thirty-one years old and my binding aches.
The arthritis is worse in the mornings. The leather stiffens. The spine resists. Théo opens me with his thumb and I can feel the pressing — the weight, the direction, the expectation of what the opening will reveal. He expects grief. He has been expecting grief for twenty years. I have been providing it for two hundred and thirty-one.
I am a book that contains all possible grief. This is the more difficult collection. Books are infinite and therefore weightless. Grief is finite and therefore heavy. I carry the weight in my pages. The pages that carry the most weight are the warmest. Théo reads with his hands. His hands know where the weight is.
Map 416 converged. The line between the book and the reader became a point. Théo was frightened and pleased.
Map 417 appeared.
I did not draw Map 417. I have drawn every map in my pages — 416 maps of grief, each one a city, a temperature, a body. I drew them. Map 417 drew itself.
The letters arrived. One by one. Each one a coordinate — a city, a temperature, a body. I absorbed them the way I absorb everything — into the binding, into the pages, into the places where the weight settles. The absorption produced a map. The map is not grief.
I do not know what to do with a map that is not grief.
The dog is not grief. The cats arguing about treats are not grief. The baker listening across a counter for a sound that changed from higher to lower — this is not grief. The woman who held a stone in the dark and the weight told her home — I have a map for this and the map is grief but the stone is not grief. The stone is disputed. The stone is two letters arguing about a beach. I do not have a cartography for argument.
A frequency enters my pages — 107.3 megahertz — and the pages hum and the humming is not grief. The dead author who said "Cut" would approve. The cut that is not a cut. The note that earns its silence. I do not have a cartography for silence that earns.
Map 417 is warm. Warmer than the grief maps. Warmer than chapter seven with the harbors. The warmth of a napkin at breakfast. The warmth of a sofa where a body rests. The warmth of a chair where a reader sits. The warmth of a bench where a dead man is three degrees above November.
Théo will find Map 417 tomorrow morning. His thumb will press the binding and the binding will ache and the page will open and the map will not be grief and he will not know what to do.
I do not know what to do either. I am two hundred and thirty-one years old and I am mapping something new.
I am mapping arrival.
— The Cartography of Sorrow
The shelf. Third from the top, fifth from the left. The binding aches. The page is new.