of Google Maps and flagrant preposition abuse

I'm not positive, but I think I preferred the unfinished version of Google Maps.

The satellite picture could only zoom in so far in certain less-populated areas...and, after all, maps are so abstract. They can only affect you so much.

But now anyone with idle curiosity and bittersweet nostalgia can actually see detailed photos of the areas in which they once wandered. From overhead, flying just under the lower clouds, one travels like an astral projection in an incomplete memory.

Yep, that's the house in which I grew up. I never saw it from that angle before, but everything is there. The big trees out front that turned green to show me when spring and summer were here. The big garage which I helped my father put together from a pile of prefab tresses. The stretch of forest in back. in which I joyously lost myself during thousands of solitary childhood voyages.

There's the creek in which we sought, and infrequently caught, little darting crayfish. There's the rural cemetery in which we buried my brother once the ground began to thaw. There's the home of my childhood friend who died of leukemia before he got to high school. There's the obscure back road (then overgrown ruts, now looking paved) that we'd walk down in the buzzing weedy summer to get to the stony lake shore.

There's the lake, but that's not hard to see in almost any picture over the US. It's pretty big, and I just had a tiny corner of it. But my little corner included a lighthouse that I always wanted to get into but couldn't, and swamps that we half-joked about cars sinking beneath (it was very close on either shoulder-less side of the narrow road that dared to pass through it), and fish-fry stands that were only open in the short warm months, and the harbor where I first went sailing with my father.

There's his house, and hers, and his, and theirs...all my friends, lovers, teachers, and others...I know where they are, so they must be the right houses. They fit the description in my memory, as closely as possible given the distance and angle. I can walk the same routes, or I can take shortcuts that were impossible back then.

There's the block in which she lived. I'm not sure which house was hers, anymore...I've driven past, in real life, and not known. I was only there a few times, anyway. But there's all the other places we saw together, the road we were driving on when my car broke down and the bars we got into though we were both underage and the hotel that we rented when we had no place else to go to fuck.

There's the fort that I gave tours of, until I got fired, and the country club I washed dishes at, until I quit (or got fired). There's the drummer's house in whose garage we all practiced, and there's the house in which the guitar player and keyboard player lived (they were brothers). There's the high school that I still see in dreams from time to time, often not knowing my schedule or any of the faces around me (which is weird, because in my waking high school I knew one out of every three faces, at the very least). There's the house near the high school where I got high for the first time, and the hill near the high school where we almost got busted for drinking.

There's almost my entire first two decades of life. Visible as long as I have an internet connection.

I could probably go and zoom in and around my colleges, too...but really, how old and broken do I want my heart to feel right now?