For a while back there, I found it comforting to live in places I could zoom out from (mentally, always mentally) and still be able to find myself, in however small and speck-like a fashion.

Beaches, coasts and other such land-water interfaces have always made me feel at home. I was born on an island.  One of my first memories is of playing with sand – in a sandbox mind you, but our house at the time wasn’t far from the ocean. The name of the town even has the word beach in it.

For many years, I chalked up that welcomed, calm and peaceful feeling to my affinity for proximity to large bodies of water – until I began to experience the zoomout.

My awareness of it increased during my daily drives to and from the sleepy little town by the bay where I worked to the slightly larger but even sleepier coastal community where I lived in a cabin under two pine trees.

The speck that I saw myself as got smaller but never too small to see. It traced my path up and down the coast as I drove south to work and north to the cabin on the highway that will always be my numero uno, and I could be sure of where I was, that I wouldn’t lose my way on this giant map that kept appearing in my head.

My best theory at the time was that the zoomout was my mind’s manifestation of a search I was reluctant to acknowledge being on. Those near-daily aerial surveys reassured me that I was still somewhere, and capable of detecting my own movements, monitoring progress in any direction if ever it should occur. I do like to be prepared – eternal vigilance, as they say.

Now the zoomout’s back, and there’s no coastline, no idyllic commute, no time for a vision quest if that’s what this ever was – just a lot of lakes, miles of circuitous shoreline, drives that ought to be bus rides, walks sideswept by a daily-strengthening breeze that will soon be an icy blast and still I am zooming out and searching for this speck that is me.

It’s always there, just somewhere in the middle of the map now instead of along the edge. The where am I? part is a more frantic moment, without being able to locate speck-me based on a definitive dividing line between earth and water. Much as boundaries might seem to be a foreign concept for me, in this way at least I seek them out.

The map is vast and tan-colored, and its main impression is of being desolate and windswept. Is it a map of the world? Of life? Whose world? My life? Does it exist, if only in my mind?