In social studies, in seventh grade, we tested ways to see the world:
Mercator, Robinson, Gall-Peters. Each one flawed in two dimensions,
distorting size or shape of continents. Could we conceive some
other likeness, one neutral, fair, and true? I asked my mother, who
showed me an orange: Unpeel it to lay flat the whole world
on the kitchen table. I said I understood.

I presented my segmented vision the next day, my pithed wedges
of Earth, lying face to face, or nesting like dolls. My mother
told me later she had not meant the fruit, but its skin,
its ragged edge, how it would flatten the curved ghost
of its missing flesh. Earth on empty orange.

There is no perfect way to take a sphere and make it planar,
hang it on the wall. Always the wrong thing is at the center.
Always it insists on itself. In this way I learned the true size
of the country of childhood. Small in the ocean of trying.