Author’s Note: This piece was meant to create contrast between a far away, imagined idealised life and the cold grinding days that make up an ordinary life over generations.

Early rising is not for the faint of heart. Maybe in some place far from here, where orange groves bend towards the light with sunbeams to support them, maybe then you would stroll down to the meadows and enjoy the warmth of that first breath of morning. Perhaps your lovers would trail behind, a lover at least, plucking fruit fresh from the stem until you turn around, startled by their stained fingers and lips.

That is not a place for you.

The sun does not rise so much as it forces back the tangled dark, illuminating everything around you in a pale, eerie blue. Even the air is reluctant to give in to the day, clinging on to that terrible cold and nipping your thin expanse of skin, building chills in mountain ranges that dip over your arms and climb up your legs.

Gasps drop like stones from your mouth as your rough soles contact the ground – take quick steps to avoid being frozen to the spot. This is not a passing worry. There are many here who have been rooted in such a way: too afraid to move, stilled and statuesque in the windows of vaguely defined shells dotted across the landscape.

There are secrets buried here. Nothing grows from this earth; it remains compacted under layers of dirt and rock which grow with the footfall of generations marching along their path. You walk on a graveyard. As the fields are revealed to you, the tide of fog retreating to that unknown place, fragments of the past peek out of the soil. 

An old coin, worn by centuries of meaningless exchanges.

A broach, once carefully pinned to a lover’s lapel, now rusted with rain.

Fragments of bones.

There are so many skeletons here that it would take becoming one yourself to count them all. Livestock, pets, roadkill, discarded possessions. They all take on the same appearance in the end. The differences hardly matter.

Still, on and on through the graves you walk, imagining all the while that sunny place just out of sight, where the air caresses your cheek and tugs at your wrist like a child, begging, “please, please, please.

A place where you are welcome, no matter how little of yourself you have to offer. All that’s required of you is inhaling the fresh, orange blossom air and taking life by the hand, telling it you’re ready to love again.

Forgiveness, maybe. Forgetting. 

But this land does not forget. There are miles of memories stamped like footprints on that beach nearly a million years ago, remaining and reminding you, I was here. I am confined to history, as you will be, but time will not wash me away.

Memory is a physical presence, not so easily discarded. This is why we bury. 

At times, you hear the softly rustling leaves as though they are only a head turn away. But they are in the other place, belonging to people who are not so much like you as they are a fresher, warmer, kinder species. That sort of thing is beaten out of you on the acreage from the moment you can speak.

You harden your skin against the cold and grow a reptilian armour. You are not bitten by frost, but you miss the gentler touches that pass you by. 

You hide yourself from the wind, covering your ears with calloused hands. The breeze will not reach your mind, but you are unlikely to hear a whisper – a warning or confession, it does not matter. Both are equally lost on you.

You lose yourself in imagining a place far from here to shield your soul from the harshness of this life. Perhaps you will remain sane, but you will forget the beauty of blue sunrises and, in time, forget yourself.