I want to go somewhere beautiful. Could you take me there?
But not just anywhere! No, not just anywhere. I don’t want
awe-inspiring beauty. I don’t want breathtaking beauty.
I don’t want to be taken to a wondrous waterfall or to a lovely wood
or to a beach so beautiful, I’ll never want to leave. I don’t want that kind of
beauty.
I want to go somewhere tragically beautiful. A ghost town, abandoned
decades ago, with nothing but old homes, old wallpaper peeling off, old unused
gas stations. An old abandoned house, invaded by grass and weeds and plants,
covered in moss, broken windows and no doors. I want to go to a really old
cemetery, maybe one that isn’t used anymore. Old gravestones with faded
engravings. Old statues broken down by time and rain and vandalized by people
who don’t care. I want to go somewhere nobody lives, somewhere so empty and
devoid of humanity it feels like it’s never been touched by man. I want to go
to this place and just sit and take in its beauty, let its tragedy sink in. I
want to feel sad about it. I want to feel like it’s away from me, it’s far from
my reach, I want to feel like there’s no salvation and it’s best we leave it
alone and go back to our little in a few towns away.
But I want to go back. I want to go back every day and explore it,
find out more about it. Why has it been abandoned? And how long? Maybe I’ll go
inside a few houses or walk up to the moss-covered stone sitting before the
house or run my fingers over faded inscriptions and wonder who they were and
why they died.
I want to feel like nothing matters. None of my problems, none of my
petty issues, none of my fears and none of my desires. I want, for once, to
feel like something is bigger than me. I want to feel insignificant. I want to
feel so small, like a speck of dust. I want to know that one day I will die and all my memories and stories will
go with me. I want to know that in a couple of decades, nobody will remember me
and someone will find my gravestone or my home or my town and wonder what
happened to the people who died, the people who lived here, the townsfolk that
gave this place life. I want to be part of this musing; I want to be part of
some stranger’s thoughts.
Please, take me somewhere beautiful. Somewhere we can hold hands and
feel sorry and sad that people leave, that people die, that we become dust.
Somewhere I can finally know with certainty that I do love you, somewhere I can
let you know. Somewhere so powerful, I forget any doubt. And in my mind, there
will only be certainties – that one day I will die and be forgotten.Let me know what you think.
This is very deep. I like the thought that all this destruction gives us a pseudo strength to move on. Whatever inspired you to write this did a good job. On another note, I'm not sure if it was your intention, and if it was, then it's all right, but in midst of your description, I sort of lost the idea that someone would be in this place with you and getting back to it was a little bit of a 'boom', but like I said, maybe you wanted it to be like that. Most importantly, I pictured your description very well, and that's not so easy to do. There's some Fitzgerald to it, I may say.
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