This is my grandparents’ village. My village too, now, I guess.
It’s there. See the specks? All 5 of them? I swear, that’s a village. People live there. Really small, backwoods people. (I can say that, as none of them — or likely, the next 3 generations of their descendants — will ever master a computer to the point of reading some nobody’s blog.)
The bigger speck in the middle is the pub, where I am trapped, day and night, until either A) a meteorite hits us, B) the nuclear power plant on Anglesey melts us into gooey mounds of eyeballs and testicles, or C) some lotto-winning knight comes and rescues me. Or none of the above: I finally get up the gumption to leave the old-timers and have a life.
This is the village where my mom grew up. The village where she grew up and then ran away from as soon as she could legally buy the tickets to get the hell out. The village she'd told me about, that hangdog look in her eyes, all throughout my own childhood, until the accident. Until I'd been forced to move there myself, with the parents she'd missed but hadn't been willing to stay with.
By 15, the only big city my mom had ever seen was Chester. What, you’ve never heard of it? Neither has anyone else who doesn’t live in North Wales or the North of England. By 15, I'd seen Mexico City, Rio. I'd climbed Machu Piccu with my parents, tagged along on my dad's photography trips down the Amazon. I'd walked down the streets of Caribbean islands ripped apart by hurricanes. My dad let me smoke a cigar once in Cuba (that shit stays in your stomach for days), and we camped for two months in Patagonia while he read to me and mom every night from some famous travel book.
And then they died, and I came here, and everything paused and went to gray.
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