Rising Dragons

Ode For Nobody

Ode for Nobody

Sometimes, the world slips down; horizons confined to that which you can see; the sky curves above you but it is no longer vast – it is only what you see. The world is much more than you can see, but it does not always seem that way. Occasionally, the sky is the stars you see above you only, and nothing else. The small glints of light are what you come to know and what you come to expect, beautiful in their simplicity and yet they don't matter in any way. They are, and that is enough for now.

The world is the sea with its endless blue waves and the sky with its ever-changing appearance, the land with its unique and diverse landscape. This is the world, but it is also so much more.

The world slips down, becomes less than it is and simultaneously more. You see the world as what lays in front of you and around you; its three-dimensional shape becomes flat and intangible feelings and emotions become three-dimensional, and figures cast their own shadows and make their own appearances. The world becomes restricted to your world and that is the world as you see it. Your world is the people you surround yourselves with, the challenges you face, the emotions you feel, and it is more than you probably recognise.

One might imagine that being able to fly would strip your ability to confine the world to your world, but this is not true. You can fly, wings outstretched and the wind keeping you afloat, and the horizon can unfold itself in front of you – the horizon itself; a distant line that can never be reached, an unattainable goal that you strive towards nonetheless.

The world and its vastness is awe-inspiring and beautiful, but it impacts everyone differently because perspectives are relative and subjective. The world can be beautiful, but your own world? That can be so much more.

This doesn't necessarily have any impact on our story, on my story, but that doesn't have to mean anything. In describing the world and its magnificence, this story takes on a romantic light, a romantic tone – or, at the very less, it sets up the possibility of love, the possibility of romance; synonymous ideas, are they not?

Romance may come into our lives, but it might not. We are young, we're still learning. We have time.

We had time. We no longer have any. What remains of us are memories, but even those are losing clarity. Who is left to remember us? Who survived and knows us? Will we become forgotten, names lost to many, unimportant and thus left to fade into the past? Indistinct, shadowy figures that don't even bear faces.

You. Me. We. Us.

Are there two, or are there more? Who is 'we'?

You know the stories of some of us, of us child soldiers partnered with animals seen as dangerous first and beings second. What of the rest of us though? For us who are unknown, the nobodies, the ones who have never been noticed and no longer have that chance.

We should get our individual stories, but here we are grouped together because we're the anonymous ones – a faceless, nameless mass. We're the ones you'll never view as individuals.

We're born like anyone else – we're born exactly the same. Born in a world that's willing to ignore us, scorn us, except we don't know that quite yet. What happens after differs for everyone, in being born we are the same, but who we are is not the same, can never be the same. There are numerous ways our lives can go. We survive. That is always the same – we get past this point in our lives, and we end up in the same place, but how we get there and who we are? It all varies. Some of us find a dragon, and some of us have a dragon hatch in front of us.

We end up in the same place. We end up found and we bond to a dragon. From there we all live the same life, living and learning. We are taught. And that's where it gets weird. You must understand it – or at least comprehend it. This is a society that has war and violence written into its very foundations. Our society is this society. It's what we live—lived.