When I was 16 I finished school and my father took me to the office that his friend Marcus ran. It had been the country's largest map makers for years and I had been granted a very exclusive apprenticeship. Marcus told me very early on that he would help me to learn the basics but I had to have the will to finally become a cartographer. I soon realised that it was not all about accuracy of lines and a clinical clean reproduction of the world around was not how the world needed to be seen. There was all the personalisation and self expression in creating maps as there was any art form. Within my second year Marcus trusted me with any of the tasks set to the office. He would tell me often how I had the best 'eye' for maps he'd ever seen. For the first time in my life I felt confident, I had finally found something I could excel in.
Each map I made, each line I drew, each mark I made was as important to me as the last. I had no favourites, all were filled with the same fire as the last. I have to admit that I maybe had a little more verve when I was doing my homelands but the changes in texture and feel of foreign vistas provided me with just as much interest and satisfaction. Be they contour lines, lakes, rail lines or roads there was no part I put off or wait to savour last. The completion of the work would bring fluctuating emotions. The soaring pride of the finished piece, the sorrow of knowing that I would not be working on that map again, the anticipation of what was next and where it would take me.
I had not had the time to socialise in years but I cared not. I would have sacrificed contact with all people to keep what I had, to continue what I was doing. Women had always made me feel awkward and uncomfortable when I was around them. I had often thought if could be as clear and precise in conversation as I was depicting mountains or coastal bays I would have had more luck with developing companionships. But who would want to be second place to what they'd see as just a sheet of paper? I was seldom, if ever troubled by these thoughts because I was already so fulfilled. Sometimes when I went out, walking round the park I would see a girl and realise the extent to which my obsession guided me through all I did. I wouldn't spot brunette or blonde, slim or voluptuous I would see the contours. Instead of fanaticising of them in states of undress or the grace of their touch I dreamt of the delicate forms and shapes they would make on my pages. Their beauty expressed with the same majesty of the mountains and rivers nature honed to perfection over the ages.
Then came the war.
There had been unrest for years. I cared little for the bickerings of people and most of my homeland's politics passed me by without raising my interests even slightly. From what I could gather, people to the west had long been under the belief that the parliament in the east brushed them to the side when planning reforms. The division between religions only further exacerbated the problem. Children were removed from schools, areas became segregated and friends soon stopped talking to each other for fear of upsetting neighbours. Escalation followed escalation and then came the inevitable. Marcus, now an old man, brought us the first proposed divisions of lands.
The war still raged but already there was provisional splits the government had deemed necessary. The thick red line carved through my work with no regard for form or beauty. There was no thought for the lay of the land, of the equilibrium that nature itself had blessed our lives with.
These divisions happened again and again. Rarely would a week go by with a new alteration. A shift to one side here and pull by the other there. By winter the factions themselves divided and in-fighting between these meant the land became four, then became five. It was not only the divisions that were breaking me and my maps up. We could no longer keep up with the loss of a village in the east, the destruction of a forest in the south or the reclamation of farmlands everywhere. I sought solace from this destruction of my life. The places I found to drink soon let me know that my heartbreak was but a scratch to those losing their own real world. These were people losing the places I had mapped, the people I had enclosed in the boxes and shading of my villages and towns. My loss was my own and I felt that it was not to be shared, I had no place to compare myself to this world I barely ever graced with my company. It was this time that I met Anna. She had lost her family early in the conflict and was doing all she could to continue to teach the few children left in our town. We did our best to fill, or at least cover, as many of the holes created in our lives. I had not thought a person could ever mean as much to me as she did, it was the one truly great thing the war ever did for me.
Spring had brought no break from the skirmishes and it was finally the time that our office fell under the control of the Government. They planned to scorch the earth where their enemies lay. My maps would be the basis of their plans and I was commended for the accuracy and detail. As I heard the first wave of planes soar over our town I knew that all my life before was now to become past and all that lay ahead would follow a path I had never anticipated. Anna and I got passage to safe neutral lands, it was hard for us both to leave but we had nothing left for us to stay. We stayed hidden for a long time and both ended up as teachers in lands far from our home. We settled with family, love and much happiness and I would now, again, consider myself a contented man. Although I will never again be a cartographer and there will always be that space where it once was. Only my dreams flow with the contours of the worlds I once created.
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