ORBIS TRANSMISSION 11
EL NIDO, LOS ANGELES
THE INTERNAL MAP
The body registered something before I could name it.
Resistance entered the breath.
The familiar became uncertain.
A place I had once known disappeared from my internal geography.
—
I returned to Paris expecting to encounter what I had feared.
Nothing was resolved.
Yet the light, the water, the trees, the architecture, and the presence of history created a sense of recognition.
Not belonging.
Not home.
Something closer to direction.
—
There are maps drawn with borders, distances, and coordinates.
There may also be maps registered through the body—through attraction and resistance, expansion and contraction, the impulse to leave, or the unexpected desire to remain.
Some places make a part of us more available.
Others seem to obscure it.
—
I do not know whether the body tells us where to go.
Perhaps it does not offer an answer.
Perhaps it offers an orientation.
A moment when something within us recognizes something outside us, before language can explain what has occurred.
—
I still do not know where I am going.
I only know that, for a moment in Paris, the internal map and the external world seemed to touch.