Words: Eve Connor (she/her)
This is the place where forgotten monuments go, salvaged before the moment of loss, never
to crumble or collapse, be ravaged or ransacked. Ashes to ashes, dust to dust. From
memory, to history, and, finally, to here. Here where everything lasts forever but cannot be
reached — not even in thought.
Some of the streets are cobbled, some are studded with rare gems, some are dirt tracks or
rubble-specked. None are accustomed to travellers. Yet still you are somehow here, the first
to leave a trail in the sand, dislodge a pebble, or smear mud across stone. You can wend
your way through the gaps between gothic cathedrals and ancient ziggurats. You can stand
at the foot of the Colossus of Rhodes and imagine yourself trampled beneath its bronze sole;
or fall to your knees before the Tower of Babel, tongue lolling, dumb struck. You can
traverse continents and centuries in a single step. Boundless potential at your feet.
But to live in the shadow of such wonders exerts a harsh pressure. None of it is yours. Can
you read the script carved across this entablature? Or decipher the meaning of the images
that wrap themselves around that column? How can a place house so much but be home to
nothing, home to no-one? When you walk these streets, you walk alone. Flesh does not
keep like marble or stone.
Alone, within a land not quite infinite but stretching out for more than a lifetime. Countless
bells from countless towers toll asynchronously, each ringing a different timbre, a concertina of
sound unfolding out to touch the horizon. In the pockets between one knell and the next,
silence — or the sound of your footfall, your breath, your heartbeat. The more you strain to
listen, the more certain you are that time cannot pass without someone else to mark it with
you.
You stop and sit at the steps of a church wedged between two looming structures that dwarf
it into obscurity. It is sunset, as it always is, and diffused with the calm that only comes with
the closing of day. You may have stumbled upon eternity. Trapped at this age, in these
clothes, and with a cut on your arm that will never quite stitch itself together. You should trek
on, seize the opportunity to see it all and find the very end. What would be waiting beyond
the sprawl of history? Eden, hidden at the heart of all we’ve lost?
It is not. One day you will reach it, after more years searching than you can comprehend.
You will trudge on as the landscape becomes sparser, as the distance between one
monument and the next takes longer to cross than it does to explore. You have given
up rushing, or hoping that you have found a final place to rest. Each time, you know,
something else out there awaits you.
You walk as if asleep through a flat expanse of desert, convinced that this trudge will prove
endless, when you come across a bundle of wood. It is small, inconsequential amid the
vastness of sand but it calls you as its witness. You kneel and try to discern its significance.
It does not hold the magnificence of what has come before, but after so long surrounded by
wonder, it takes effort to recognise beauty. You focus until you see a spark. A lick of fire
beneath the twigs and branches. It grows brighter — and, yes, the sky grows darker in turn.
The sun sinks below the plain for the first time and rises as the burgeoning fire.
You stay, enraptured, so close you could burn. And yet the warmth is like the touch of a
hand. Your skin, that for so long has been as impervious as stone, softens to flesh, and once
again you can feel your tears as they roll down your cheek.
