Someone Give Me a Map To Georgia

Someone give me a map to Georgia.

Someone give me a map to red wine, and khinkali, to peaches and fried chicken, or that Ray Charles song everyone loves singing to me.

Someone trace me home to Simei, where the four beauties paint the walls of the void decks I never played in,

to my childhood room with a double decker bed, and a tiny window overlooking the road outside

Someone tell me what it means to move from west to east when my country is only 50 kilometres (that’s 31 miles for the Americans in the room) from east to west.

Someone give me a map to Georgia.

They keep talking about pivoting around here.

The Google definition of pivot is “the central point, pin, or shaft on which a mechanism turns”, or to “turn on as if on a pivot”. It synonyms are  —  to rotate. To swivel.

When they talk about pivoting, they’re talking about what it means to move from one career to another, how life is never linear but more a jumbled up mess with roundabouts and dead ends. You just have to jump from that dead end to reach the other end, but I’ve never reached the other end.

I’ve always been stuck on the spot, standing so still I’m frozen, my fingertips barely bending, my knees shaking as they struggle to find a direction. The cold wind bites here. My blood is frozen. My lips are stinging.

The ink in my pens have dried up.

I dig through my stationery for newer pens and come up with nothing.

I look at scraps, hoping to mash them into something bigger. But it never becomes bigger. I write small words about small places and small spaces.

I am one letter stacked upon another. I am 10,000 words into a draft with no real meaning. I don’t know what makes a poem a poem and a story prose and nothing more.

The map of Singapore might be small, but the map to Georgia is even smaller.

There are train tracks running beneath my skin, always circling in loops. Do you hear them go by? They’re loud and clunky, and they keep me awake at night. They want to cross the ocean but are bound by land.

They can’t find the map to Georgia.

Someone give me directions to Georgia.

When people ask me what I write, I shrivel up and laugh, “Uhurhurhur words?”

What I mean is: take no notice of me. I have nothing of note. I don’t have anything to say. I am unimportant. There is no map to find me.