Untitled Story About Nothing in Particular/ Or Perhaps the Title Comes After – Part I

Some years ago, I had a strange dream. It wasn’t like a normal dream; I was partly conscious, or perhaps fully conscious – it was in the twillight zone between day-dreaming and actual sleep-dreaming.

In that dream, I was in a small mountain village. I wasn’t myself – in that I wasn’t Alex Tee; I was someone else. I looked different, had a different identity, a different history. I was perhaps in my early forties, and was born somewhere far away, in a big city, a major metropolis. For the past few years though, I had been in that mountain village – and the locals, who knew who everyone was, had began to slowly accept me as one of them.

I was running away from something – A refugee from my past. I had the sense that my appearance and subsequent settling down in that village was the culmination of a long, exhausting journey, over many places, over many weeks and months. Yet I had found respite in that village, and had started to rebuild a broken life in that mountain village.

The village was high among the mountains and lay at the foot of a huge mountain. The mountain was so dominating, so assertive, that it appeared as if the village existed entirely by virtue of the mountain. The mountain was physical, the village ephemereal. The shadow that the mountain cast on the village was real and tangible, the motley jumble of brick and concrete dwellings almost metaphysical in existence. The more affluent households had white render on their walls, and the village was characterised by steep slopes and gravel roads, well-used but meticulously kept in good condition by the villagers. It was quite a big and busy village, almost a town. This was in part due to its location as the centre of a clutch of similar villages scattered around the mountains.

I had a skill. The skill was, while not unique, relatively valuable to that village. I offered my services in return for a roof over my head, food, and for something to do to pass the time. It was partly the reason the villagers accepted me – they didn’t know anything about big metropolises, but they understood a skilled craftsman, especially a useful one, and for that reason I quickly became part of the community.

TO BE CONTINUED

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