I often survey the streets around here and feel that I don't belong - that the streets, slick with rainwater, are not me.
If these streets and I are not one, then I do not belong anywhere. Miserable buildings thrown together out of red bricks, skies roiling with an imminent deluge, and gobs of dog shit fastened to every pavement.
No, this town is an imposter: it is as if I have been scraped from the surface of the earth and splattered down elsewhere.
If I do not belong here, in this small town with its torn-up railway, ripped from the ground and flung afar as if by a giant, and its tiny post office, then the memories that were formed here, and the events that preceded them, do not belong here either.
The mistakes, pleasure and unrequited love experienced beneath the patch of sky which delimits the boundaries of 'here' could have been experienced anywhere else, at any other time.
Nothing is unique, or sacred. Memories are created as if on a conveyor belt, and implanted uniformly in human brains. This is why singers who sing about lost love make millions of pounds on occasion - because their words resonate the mass memory of experiencing lost love, and separate us inevitably from our money.
I belong nowhere, and my most cherished memories exist in the mass collective reflection of humanity itself. This is one of the traits of what it means to be a human being - I have a water
droplet of past events meandering in the sea of history, and my droplet is just like any other.
To know this and to accept it is to equate all sentient humans, each relinquishing their mirrory coagulation of memory into the limitless ocean.
