The Holographer's Atlas

The Holographer's Atlas
I. Ph. de Lange
Some women keep diaries. I kept men.
Not the way that sounds - or perhaps exactly the way it sounds, depending on who you are. I kept them the way a cartographer keeps coordinates: precisely, without sentiment, because coordinates are useless unless they are true.
This is not memoir. Memoir requires distance. These are field notes from a life lived at close range - the Italian who watched me dance on a block in Benidorm and asked me to cancel my life for him, and I almost did; the Vor v Zakone who read my books before he met me, understood what he was looking at, and left anyway because men like that always leave; the sand sculptor I have been finding my way back to across three decades, who once warned a man I was with: careful with this one, she will break your heart. He was right. He always is.
A Dutch anthropologist, an aristocratic upbringing, and a body that has been in more kinds of rooms than it should have. The Atlas is where I write about those rooms without Elena to hide behind.
One woman. Many coordinates. The same sea, always.