Nowhere, really

Where I come from isn’t really anywhere at all. It’s a shell of something that was hardly worth calling anything, really… when anyone still called it anything. It’s somewhere people pass through quickly, without a second glance, without looking back, hoping they make it to wherever they’re trying to get, hoping that they don’t suffer some kind of breakdown on their way to, well, somewhere… anywhere that isn’t here. You could call it a ghost town, but, if you ask me, not even ghosts want to roam here.

People would jokingly say that it looks like the middle of nowhere, but it’s not all that funny to those of us who are from here… wherever here is. If you could go back to a time where there was some life in this little place, if you could find an old greybeard to tell you what they vaguely remembered of what used to be, you’d hear names like Potter, Kirk, Charnel, Undercroft, Stone, Van Grab… grave men with ashen faces that painstakingly laid out little plots, who tilled the soil and dug trenches, did all manner of backbreaking work. By the sweat of your brow will you have food to eat until you return to the ground from which you were made. For you were made from dust, and to dust you will return. Those who pass here, never knew these hard men.

This place is nowhere, really. Sure, there are markers here and there, a road in dire need of repairs, fencelines that exist only as rusty barbs embedded in decaying posts planted in a haphazard line. The only directions that ever existed were merely remembered and passed on to the few, if any, who wanted to know. The founders have been forgotten, as has the name that this idea of a place once may have had. It may never have had a name, but merely registered as a blip, a marker on the way to somewhere else, somewhere better… somewhere worse? No-one wants to be stuck where I’m from, a place unnamed, a place that typifies facelessness, obscurity, a place that is always eerily silent.

Those who call it home do not know one another, keeping to themselves. No-one comes knocking and few even so much as glance at the depressing, decrepit dwellings, with their unexceptional, unremarkable inhabitants. Though we few are intensely private, guarding all manner of secrets, this is a place not unwelcoming to outsiders and drifters, the uncelebrated and obscure will remain so, should they stay here. Most are outcasts and wanderers; some are destitute, finally (out of necessity) settling in this desolate place. 

Where I am from is nowhere, really. It was never home to victorious men, or accomplished women. There was never laughter of excited children or the blissful thrill of new love. Where I am from is home to the sombre, with only the lonely and sombre existing in peace and quiet.

Everything here is austere and practical - there’s nothing decorative, no baubles and trinkets, for no-one has any need of them. As for flora, nature has reclaimed much of what was once created; only wild flowers now adorn these spaces. There is a strange sort of contentedness, being among these paupers and pariahs, regardless of what’s left of their paltry existence. Though residents here have aged (not exactly gracefully) there are many who suffered for the entirety of their young lives. Not a soul regards this place as sacred, as we exist without the illusion of immortality.

Where I come from, we personify the wretched, the abandoned, the unwanted, unwelcome and unloved. Many have been ravaged by pestilence, others have fled penalty or isolate as some sort of self-imposed penance. Our plight, though agonising, goes unheard, our pleas dissipating, ephemeral as mist before the morning sun. 

In the vast emptiness of this place I am from, this field of spectres, there is but one structure that has endured, though all have long forgotten its creator, likely some well-meaning cleric living a life of solitude. It is a lone cross with an inscription all but eroded by the elements. The letters, as if carved by a hesitant wraith, faintly outline two words: Potter’s Field. 

Where I come from, the innominate are not intruders, but rather the newly interned. No bells will peal for us, the pale pantomimes of a life long-forgotten. We are the unchristened, the unbaptised, the scorned and disparaged. Here, in the unmarked charnel house, decays the bones of those who perished in poverty, in obscurity. Where I come from, there is no one to lament or bemoan an existence ended. Long forgotten is the old, wooden church, reduced to ashes, just as those who have been returned to the earth. 

The fate of those in the unmarked graves is unknown. Their stories will remain untold. Their lives will not be commemorated. The desperate cries to an Almighty have been swept away on the wind. There is nothing in God’s acre, but emptiness and anonymity. No-one knows whence we came, or who was first. We were not important. We hardly were at all. 

Where I come from, the dearly departed were dear to none. Where I come from, all are faceless, nameless hints at someone who could have been someone. The perpetual addition of the insignificant, the inconsequential individuals added to purgatory, to limbo, to oblivion. Did someone say a short prayer? Did anyone weep for us? Was our absence noted? Were we missed? Mourned? Or was our departure from this world simply overlooked? Where were the mothers who were supposed to hold us, shelter us from the cruel world? Did Jesus not instruct you to care for the least of these? Do you not fear God’s wrath for abandoning us?! Why have we been discarded in an abandoned patch of barren dirt? We have been returned to the earth, though we had no place in the world.

We have been consigned to insignificance. Are we anywhere at all if we do not even live on in memory? Where I come from, is nowhere, really.