there is always another world that we don’t get to see

You are a geographer transposed into a foreign landscape. The paint is still wet, the fault lines, your figure a pencil-smudge silhouette against the world you see, you alone, nobody else. I knew it from the first. The map, the beautiful one, I fell in love with someone over this map. I know it might not seem that beautiful, but it is to me. The way you held it, pulled it open, your movements so practiced with the knowledge of folds I’m sure you’d memorised. Like worship. An accordion. An instrument to you which the rest of us could just barely picture, and only then because of how your fingers would skirt across the grid to find each new note and then play it, soft and low.

Creases which bent one way and not the other, weathered and tender with use, how you smoothed the whole thing out with such ease and your thumb lingered over a spot I didn’t understand, couldn’t recognise. But you did. I know you did. I could tell even then, before your hair was pink and before I’d seen the heart of it, from the way your eyes whispered over every contour and I could see the mountains taking shape right there in front of you.

I looked and tried to see—I couldn’t. The hills were yours only; the shuddering, slate-sharp shape of them. Your shoulders tensed a little and I knew you were feeling it, seeing it.

The cold. The view. Your beautiful thing. You, beautiful thing. All the world a mess of geographies to you, everything interconnected and always colliding, your language formed by a home where each day was a fractal, each sentence a city built from the sewers up.

I knew we were both only in that class because of its single-paragraph description, the word biosphere, the word collapsing—except it was syntax for me and topography for you. I liked the way it sounded; you liked the space each word took up on the blank-page horizon. The sound, yes, but the attrition of syllables, the whir of machinery, the rift torn in the canvas between beauty and biospheric breakdown. You see the world in a way I never could. Every line an atlas, a landscape, a brand-new yet-unscaled massif for you to summit and chart in a way so different to anyone else I’ve ever seen, will ever see. You are writer and cartographer both, all things the surface of the earth, the peaks and the troughs, the valleys and the lives within. You read a poem and you see the contours, you breathe them, the delineations of land and sea and legislation which mark the full stops like trig points glinting at the height of things. It’s your spinning globe, your rising sun, your political ecological implications that shape the cobbled streets rattling on beneath your scooter. I don’t have the words for it but you would—you always do. You’d draw a map. You’d know the way.