• When I was very young, maybe five or six years old, before I actually understood the concept of the globe, I remember sitting in the hallway of the upper story of my elementary school, waiting to go to the school library, staring at a map hanging on the wall in front of me. It was one of those Mercator maps: all the continents distorted to fit on one oval that represented the world. By this time I knew the world was round, but I didn’t know about cartography and the different ways people drew maps to fit all seven continents in. In my mind, this was a picture of one side of the Earth, just like a photo is a picture of one side of a person. All I could think of while looking at that map was, “This is only one side of the planet. What about the other side of the world?”

    Later, I found out that the seven land masses displayed on that piece of laminated poster board were all there was. There was no other side that had yet to be explored and mapped out, and besides, wasn’t the world we have now big enough already? But a part of me never really accepted that. Even in high school, I’d sit in my AP United States History class, hearing the teacher lecture but not really listening, daydreaming about distant, untamed lands.

    Then junior year ended, and I was hit with the sudden realization that the next year of my life would be wholly devoted to crushing those foolish childhood dreams and preparing me for the rat-race of adult life. I stood in a line to return my textbooks, clutching my APUSH book, watching the students in front of me turn in their childhood aspirations along with their textbooks. Finally, it became my turn to hand in my books. As I was removing the book cover from my APUSH book, something colorful printed on the cover caught my eye. I studied the Mercator map in my book for a brief moment, and suddenly I remembered being six years old and wanting to see the other side of the world. I handed the book back to the woman at the desk, groaned as she fined me for water damage that was there in the beginning of the year before I even got the book, and walked out into the warm, inviting summer sunlight towards the strip mall where I would be meeting my friends for lunch, all the while thinking about that map.

    If I’d had any sense I would have let it go. I’d have gone to lunch with my friends, gone home to dive into the pool, celebrated the end of another school year, and forgotten the map along with the rest of my childish ambitions. I would have graduated in the top twenty percent of my class, would have gone to college and gotten a degree in computer programming, would have wound up like my parents – seemingly content but always desperate for something interesting to talk about, desperate to break the monotony of day-to-day life. I would have ignored the gleaming metal object half-obscured by the bushes on my way to the restaurant, would have written it off as an old, broken car part. I would not have picked it up and slipped it into my pocket, would not have taken it home and cleaned it off, would not have carried it around with me the rest of the day.

    If I’d had any sense, I wouldn’t be in the mess I’m in now. But then, if everyone had sense, nothing interesting would ever happen, would it?