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.
We're taught and we have normal classes – math, history, navigation, flying, magic, and so much more. We have normal classes. Normal when you consider the fact we all have dragons bonded to our minds. But, here's the thing, we don't stand out. We're everyone and no one. We're the ones in the back of the classroom joking about, the ones in the front jotting down notes, the ones in the middle caught in between.
So, yes, we're taught and we learn and we don't stand out. But our society has made violence an intrinsic trait, war has value and those who fight in it are praised; those who fight are praised. The Academy taught that strength is in winning spars, but strength was written into our bones. We survived and that is our strength. It is not their strength, but it is ours. In this, we could not meet their standards. In this, we were average. In this, we are everybody who have never been viewed as something other than part of a collective.
We learn and we grow with each second that passes. We change, our identity shifting with our decisions and actions. We are who we are, and maybe we hide it, but maybe we don't. Maybe we lie about it or maybe we say the truth. We are everyone, but simultaneously, we are no one too. We go out to fight, you know. We go and fight because our civilisation has engraved the need into our bones. We go to war and we die.
We're born, like everyone else. In one way or another, we go to the same place – we're all found and we all bond. We learn. We grow. We die. The wheel turns constantly, never-changing, always forward, always the same; continuous, ceaseless. It moves down the slope, road worn beneath its steady revolving; flat and steady; predictable and calm. Surprises aren't excepted, and they don't occur. This is what we are – predictable, normal, ordinary. The same as everyone everywhere; what else did you expect?
It all comes down to this in the end, doesn't it? A war between two forces. A war that was always going to come even if the participants change. A war that could have been foretold by those who realised that our society has violence as its foundation. A war that ends in our death. A war with child soldiers under the bright light of day. A war where we easily declare one side is evil and one side is good. A war we go to fight in and full-heartedly believe we will come out alive. We die, and die, and die. We die in pain, screaming and crying and begging. We die in fire, in agony, in blood pouring from cuts, in kills that aren't mercy but something worse. We die and maybe it was always going to end this way.
We die and we died. We died. And we will be forgotten, unknown. For everyone ignored because they are average. In not standing out, we bring our own death. We die, both physically and in memory. We die because we don't stand out, and in being average, memories of us would never last.
Group us together and mark us as normal. We are not leaders, we shouldn't have been soldiers either, but we were nevertheless. In blending in, we become lost. Without families, and occasionally without pasts, we were killed without mercy but also without discrimination.
In the Academy, our world is what we are being taught, it is restricted to our friends, our insecurities, our pride, our achievements. It's our emotions and our attachments to others, and – of course – our dragons. It is a small world, but it is our world nonetheless. We never had the chance to expand our world, killed too early, died too young. It is a travesty, but this is not the tragedy here.
Our tragedy is that we have been forgotten, for we are nobody and everybody, everywhere and nowhere.
When you think of the battle, of our war, try to remember us. We know you'll forget, that you'll remember the heroes and the martyrs first and always. But try to remember us, we who fought and died and never had the chance to be more. We won't be disappointed if you forget, we're nobody after all.
Poem: The Unknown Dead by Henry Timrod
The rain is plashing on my sill,
But all the winds of Heaven are still;
And so it falls with that dull sound
Which thrills us in the church-yard ground,
When the first spadeful drops like lead
Upon the coffin of the dead.
Beyond my streaming window-pane,
I cannot see the neighboring vane,
Yet from its old familiar tower
The bell comes, muffled, through the shower.
What strange and unsuspected link
Of feeling touched, has made me think—
While with a vacant soul and eye
I watch that gray and stony sky—
Of nameless graves on battle-plains
Washed by a single winter's rains,
Where, some beneath Virginian hills,
And some by green Atlantic rills,
Some by the waters of the West,
A myriad unknown heroes rest.
Ah! not the chiefs who, dying, see
Their flags in front of victory,
Or, at their life-blood's noble cost
Pay for a battle nobly lost,
Claim from their monumental beds
The bitterest tears a nation sheds.
Beneath yon lonely mound—the spot
By all save some fond few forgot—
Lie the true martyrs of the fight,
Which strikes for freedom and for right.
Of them, their patriot zeal and pride,
The lofty faith that with them died,
No grateful page shall farther tell
Than that so many bravely fell;
And we can only dimly guess
What worlds of all this world's distress,
What utter woe, despair, and dearth,
Their fate has brought to many a hearth.
Just such a sky as this should weep
Above them, always, where they sleep;
Yet, haply, at this very hour,
Their graves are like a lover's bower;
And Nature's self, with eyes unwet,
Oblivious of the crimson debt
To which she owes her April grace,
Laughs gaily o'er their burial place.
Song: Disappear from the Dear Evan Hansen
I've got my first exam in two days, but look at all that studying that's not going on. Guess I should possibly get back to it.
Update: first exam is over now and I've got five left to go - enjoy these guys!
Also, A Dragon's Retribution got a new chapter yesterday (on the 30/10/18), but I'm not sure if anyone got the notification.
Edited: 3/02/2021