Forgotten

It lives a life of disconnection; to walk down the street and stare, stare blankly at the passingby-people or into the distance as if you are longing for something unknown and unspoken. The day is emptiness. You can hear your footfall pitter-patter on the silent stones that are smooth as if many times in the past they have been worn away worn away by these ghost people who no longer live… here … The buildings gleam but they are marked with past dominions, past strongholds; the buildings gleam but the faces are a blank. They hide their old lives under their headscarves buried behind an aging market stall, as if somehow it does not matter and one day they will die. There is no hope… no hope… or very little hope… A tramp speaks perfect English to me but a bank worker cannot. Even at night when the lights switch on and the tight-jeaned youths with their blade-sharp hair emerge, generating a black vibrancy around McDonald’s. Their lives become tangible in this atmosphere, in these moments, but by the next morning they are gone, dispersed to their beds or behind their shop counters. And as I watch them I ask myself the question that nobody in the world will ask because they have no idea that these forgotten peoples actually exist outside magazine articles: where have they been and what will they become?

Ferries glide past one another without a glance, all marked with the same name… in and out, in and out, the sea, the ships, the passers-by, and all the time from above the bare mountain looms its grey stone down at us. Maybe there are more sheep than people in this country. It is harsh, as if you would bleed were you to touch it. When we drive through these cliffs I feel as if we might fall off. The country is haunted by what it has seen, what it has undergone. It has been stripped bare down to the callous texture of the craggy dried up rocks.

And there we sit, at the furthest point of the quayside. You battle the wind to get to us. We say we bring knowledge, help and hope. But to these places beyond hope, the places in the grey area between the worlds, the places in this perpetual bare, harsh fog beauty of islands and islands mixed with mist, sometimes we stretch out and it seems to come back empty-handed; the eyes under the headscarf push us away in suspicion at yet another dream let down. Our hope just sits there, at the end of the quayside, floating in the misty air.