So, I have an unhealthy obsession with maps. It’s something that may seem a little strange to the general public, but I’m comfortable writing about it here as I’m sure most Matador readers share the disorder.

I could easily while away an hour looking over a country map…any country. Really. Malta, Suriname, San Marino…small, but they’ll still do the trick. Give me a world atlas and you might not see me for weeks.

What is it about the stark lines of political boundaries, the arced script tracing a mountain range, or the wayward paths of unpronounceable rivers that’s so intriguing? It’s not the thrill of the unknown, because I get just as absorbed in a map of somewhere I’ve been as somewhere I haven’t. Rather, it’s a hunger, to cram the names into my brain, to suck up every bit of data about a place and try to makes sense of its links to the wider world, in time as well as space.

And I have a great tool for that. On a hallway wall, I’ve tacked a 1951 National Geographic Society map of “Asia and Adjacent Areas.” Every time I pass I stop to peruse it, and it never fails to offer up a new anachronistic gem that gets my mind racing.

Of course there are the obvious ones. The three entities of French Indochina share the same purplish hue, Korea is whole (just barely), Pakistan lies to the east of India as well as to the west, and the great hulking mass of the USSR seems poised to devour it all.

But looking closer, I find things like Netherlands New Guinea, the last Dutch holdout in Indonesia. (Independence was granted to the island conglomerate in 1949, but West New Guinea remained a colony until 1962.)

East Africa and the Arabian Peninsula are full of unfamiliar shapes and names. Northern Somalia is sectioned off as British Somaliland, with Djibouti labeled French Somaliland. The entire southern third of the peninsula, apart from the coast, is completely vacant, marked as “Empty Quarter”—no boundaries, no roads, nothing. The color shadings for Yemen, the Aden Protectorate, Oman, and Trucial Oman materialize as if from nothing where land meets sea.

But my favorite find so far is Sikkim. This tiny territory hidden away between Nepal, Bhutan, and Tibet is now a state of India. For centuries, though, it was an independent kingdom, known in ancient times as Indrakil, the “Garden of Indra.” Its borders contain a stunning diversity of landscape, with an elevation range from 920 to 28,000 feet (the world’s third-tallest mountain).

From 1947 to 1975, Sikkim was a suzerainty of India with limited autonomy, enough to earn it a distinct shade of yellow on my map. In 1975, it was fully incorporated into the Indian nation under somewhat dubious circumstances. China refused to acknowledge India’s claim to Sikkim until 2003, when India agreed to recognize Tibet as part of China.

All of this, which I may never have known if not for the specific vintage of map hanging on my wall.

So, as I’ve allowed my life to grow sedentary for the past 8 months, perhaps maps have helped fill the void created by my lack of movement, of physical exploration. Seeing the world like this, both its past and present, informs my future travels.