Map questioning
I saw my wife today, walking in front of our house. That’s a short, simple, declarative sentence, wholly true, though also impossible, wrong, a lie.
I could recognize her hair, her gait, her herness immediately. But this can’t be: She moved out long ago. The woman I saw was five years younger than my ex is now and the day was glorious full summer instead of this piss-drizzle winter. Yet thanks to the chance passing of a Google mapping vehicle (a car, let’s presume) one unremarkable September day, she’s still there now, shaded by those easement-strip trees I maintain but don’t quite own, on the way to check the mail.
For no particular reason I’d checked out my own address in their maps app and seen her ghost passing by. I smiled, thinking how much she would hate to be captured forever — or at least until the next Google update — in this suburban hell.
I mouse-walked back and forth along the road. Google’s car must have been moving quickly; she travelled only a small distance in the time the mapping car was on the block. My truck was also parked on the street, because (as I could see) there was a large pile of topsoil that had been delivered and dumped in our driveway. That was soil I’d used to build an herb garden for her, I recalled, working my mind back in time. I noticed that the left side of the truck was intact, not yet damaged. Later that summer it was cosmetically but annoyingly crushed against a concrete pillar.
I zoomed in on the scene. They had blurred some details, but I still knew her clothes, the clip in her hair, and the sandals she wore. I stared for a minute, wishing I could lean against, into, through the screen, close enough to take her hand, to walk us away from there, to protect us both from the approaching decay. Let’s go, I’d say, let’s leave this house, this garden, this life behind, just take each other and find each other again and start over.
She wouldn’t, of course, have understood. Nor would I. The damage I did to the truck was immediate, obvious, and clear. Had I cared enough, I could have fixed it. The damage to our relationship was almost too gradual to notice, a sad, slow sunset of withdrawal and detachment. Had I loved enough, I could have fixed it. When I saw the end coming, there was no braking or swerving. I steered into the crash, my foot on the gas, and no belt or airbag was likely to save the decades-long relationship. Google couldn’t possibly know or capture this, though, and the fragment of a life they captured can never tell the full story.
