Sailing Alone Around the Room

The year after I finished wandering around the northern hemisphere,  I hardly ever left my room. I went from nomad to shut-in. Either one, extreme vagrancy or extreme solitude, can do weird things to your head.

I'd fitted out my room so efficiently—desk pressed against the bed, mounted book shelves climbing all four walls—that it had a nautical feel. I often found myself thinking of my room as a boat with a desk for a cockpit, a keyboard for a helm. In it, motionless, I went pitching along through mental crests and troughs. To one wall, beneath the plywood shelves, I'd pinned a cheap map of the world on which I charted my own drift routes and those of the castaway toys and by which I sometimes navigated, trying to get the coordinates right.