Nowhere.

I woke from a sleep of a thousand uncaptured dreams with a new dawn of expectation threatening the horizon. As unwanted as disco lights at a funeral the sun climbed over the hills yawning, stretching and shimmering across frosted, mirror ball, meadows. A chipper morning chorus cheering it on, delighted to be at the wake.

It was the devil in resurrection.

God help me.

I made a coffee so at least my heart had hope that it would not have to go it alone and I sat at my kitchen table pleading with the second hand of the clock to stop.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

In only a few moments the spear of productivity would return to stab at my back, cutting into my haunches for quid pro quo.

I looked over to my laptop lying flat and flaccid at the end of the table amidst an array of bulging files and memo notes. A nested trojan horse hiding an invading army of sleeping monsters all waiting to waterboard me with oceans of inconsequence.

I sipped at my coffee to stifle my screams.

Once...

That trojan horse had been a receptacle of dreams.

A conduit to faraway shores.

Uploading fantasy and adventures.

Once...

We had waged wars and danced around fires together.

Loved and lost and cried together.

We had battled, then bled, then died together.

Once upon a time.

Now, all we were was a series of once upon a times in a catalogue of yesterdays. The taps of my fingers across its keyboard the death rattle of any creative, literary, potential I may have had. All of it sapped from me, dried up, processed, and filed into spreadsheets and group chats. The words "Have you switched your audio on?" incendiary to my dried up tinder.

I drained my cup and looked for a well needed distraction.

Perhaps...I should eat?

I got up and walked over to inspect the contents of my fruit bowl which I located near the sink, amongst an ever-growing in-tray of dirty dishes. Within it I found a shrunken orange, a bruised apple, a blackened banana, and a forlorn pear. Collateral remains from my new year good intentions.

I picked up the pear and pressed at its skin. As sad as it looked it was still too hard. I placed it back in the bowl next to its withered companions and sighed at the sorry state of the unloved collection. At some point all that fruit would have been at peak perfection and I had ignored it.

There was a chance that maybe tomorrow I would grow hungry and find that my pear had become ripe and tender, full of sweet juice that would ooze from my bite and trickle down my wrists, and I would find myself chasing every last delicious drop of it.

There was, of course, also a chance that I would not even think of that pear tomorrow and then the day after it would be waiting to spawn flies just like the other forgotten fruit.

Potential was so fleeting, its appreciation.... happenchance.

I blinked away a tear that had dewed up my eye and in anger at the weakness I wagged my finger at the pathetic fruit bowl and said, "life is a bitch and then you die." I turned, switched the kettle on to make more coffee and realised... I had just chastised a bowl of fruit.

It was then I knew...

I had to get out.

I threw on my jeans, a thick woollen jumper, hat, scarf, gloves, boots, and winter coat.

And out I went.

My front door banging behind me in solid affirmation.

The monsters inside the trojan horse would have to fight amongst themselves today. I had other demons to wrestle with.

I strode out down my lane. To the left lay the village with the promise of warm pastries and gourmet coffee. A place of tidy, red tiled roofs populated with people who could offer companionship for my misery. A place full of distracting shop windows and welcome smiles. A place where...

I turned right.

Towards the hills, the moorlands, and the old copper quarry. I needed a win. Fighting my way into the nowhere land felt like a challenge I could rise to.

I was out to beat this day.

I wound my way up and along suicidal pathways strewn with the debris of nature's vicious fury. Waded through aged, sharp tongued, grasses that grabbed at my legs through icy, threadbare jackets. Walked down narrow passageways hung with icicles like devil's teeth, dripping with contempt. Passed by lonesome trees stood like hags, naked and twisted, warning of hopelessness.

Despite the obstacles and the warnings.

I.

Pushed.

On.

The whip of the wind thrashing me for my madness.

I slipped. I fell. I dug in and I clawed my way up the slippery slopes. My cheeks raw and my muscles burning as I reached the edge of the abandoned quarry on all fours... like a dog.

Breathless, I panted for a while. Then, I rose like a warrior surveying a battlefield. Before me, scored into the rack and ruin chessboard landscape lay the giant pock mark of the old copper quarry. Its blue-green patina an enduring bruise to the metal that had been stolen from it. The stolen capitol of Nowhere Land.

I felt my chin lift and my heart become steady.

I could be a Queen in a place like this.

I breathed in the darkness of my spiritual kingdom, soaking its damp, neglected essence into my soul. It was a bittersweet reverie that I was sure I could hold onto forever.

The sun had different ideas.

At first it simply winked at me from behind a flanking mountain, chancing its charm. Then, with the ease of silk sliding across a new lover's bed, it slipped its light sensuously into my barren kingdom, kissing its hard edges and crags, flirting with its nooks and crannies, enticing it to give up its darkness.

I watched as my newly claimed kingdom succumbed willingly to the sun's flighty charms. Within moments the land before me had joyously de-robed from its dark and was iridescently revelling in the fleeting attention of its new lover. Offering it, in gratitude, a kaleidoscope of hued turquoise jewels from its coppery patina.

My anger surged at the vanity.

I fixed my eyes intently at the sun as though somehow, I may have become regal enough to stare it down from ascendency.

I was a fool. An unrecognised, lied to, forgotten, passed over, unappreciated, fool... my prospective kingdom was being bewitched and I was being made a mockery.

I picked up a rock and threw it at the skyline... then another... then another... until all the loose pebbles and stones around me had been hurled at the sun's bright, smug face. Then, with nothing left to throw I gathered into my chest all the energy I had left in the world and surrendered it in one last gasp for glory.

I screamed.

The sound of my depravity filling the quarry and echoing out and down into the valley, across the scrub land and into the acoustic abyss of the sky. I screamed until my lungs crumbled into a buckshot of coughs and I collapsed on the floor.

I had nothing more to give.

I stared blankly into the heavens in abject sacrifice and lay silent and still in the eye of my own storm. Deaf to all but my heart pounding into the ground under my back.

Deflated.

Defeated.

The sky swirled above me in a victory dance. Fast flowing clouds moved by, parading in triumph. Teasing me by smudging out the sun only to swiftly return it. Rolling and folding into each other in jubilant murmuration.

I closed my eyes and let them dance all over me in eddying pools of light and shade. The stinging wounds of my anger rinsed by their ebb and flow. My battered body feeling like the hand of God was tickling it.

I smiled.

Defenceless.

I giggled.

Before long I was laughing. Howling and rolling around the roughshod ground... my eyes streaming and belly aching, unable to gain control of my face.

Was it the absurdity of where I was or the madness of who I was?

Did I even care?

I had lost and I was liberated.

I got to my feet.

Breathed deeply.

And

I

Walked

On.

I crunched through aging bracken. Enjoying its crack. Jumped over bogs and squelched across brooks. Marched along proud dry-stone walls. Saluted arrows of geese as they thundered overhead. Eavesdropped on a murder of crows deep in salacious conversation and treasured the haunting hoot of a barn owl reaching out to me in reassuring solidarity.

I quenched my thirst with handfuls of water gathered from free-flowing streams and filled my lungs with crystal clear air.

I walked... and I walked... and I walked.

To my own tune.

In my own time.

In my own way.

The wind mellowed, turning to a breeze light enough to carry with it a pulse. The chug of cars, the hum of industry, the buzz of people.

There was somewhere nearby.

I headed into its rhythm as though caught in a slipstream. The familiarity of it other-worldly, as though I was reaching back into another life and hearing details that had been glossed over. Cars rolled by like waves breaking on a shore. Footsteps of varying tempo drummed out a beat. The hammer and bang of a world being knocked apart and recreated rang and clanged around me. The cheers and whoops of children playing in the school yard pulsed between the percussion. Everyday sounds harmonising together like an improvised soundtrack to an accidental narrative.

The dent in the road sign. The worn away pavement. The missing grid lid. The single blue traffic cone in a row of orange. The abandoned shoes on a telephone wire. Things that had happened, stuff that had been done. Stories hiding in plain sight. An exhibition of curated gems ready for exploration.

The sky began to smoulder in the dying embers of the day, and I walked towards its retreating warmth. The shadow of night pushing me on from behind until there came a point where light and shade ceased to be opposites and for a few moments the sky became a huge, tie-dyed blanket that swaddled the world.

My feet slowed, and I sat down on a wooden bench heavily etched by the overlapping words and thoughts of different times and ages.

Tracey loves Jason.

Marry me Emily.

**** off.

Stories, cut into the fabric of life.

People passed by me, running for buses, cussing the time, chatting on phones, listening to their music. All of them on their way to somewhere from everywhere, anywhere, and maybe some, like me, from nowhere. Each wrestling with their personal demons. Chasing the potential and the possibility that lay around them and within them. Following it onto buses, into taxis, across roads, into dead ends, down winding lanes, across green pastures, into shallow waters, down into oceans, on to motorways, up into the skies.

Their journeys weaving around me like a bohemian rhapsody underneath an endless tie-dyed sky of possibility.

I sat and I watched.

In full appreciation.