Ozymandias Wasn’t Here.

Ozymandias Wasn’t Here.
Lee.

Some people remain nomads all of their life. Vast is the desert for these dwellers of the dunes. The starry night a highway which they navigate to find their north, south, east and west, yet in circles they appear to travel to the untrained eye. Footprints in the sand a transient reminder of where they’ve been but not where they’re going, and where they’re going only an handful could follow. They are both prisoners and governors in the open-air prison they roam, yet they belong to neither and feel only freedom imagined by the caravans of travellers they criss-cross paths with on occasion. Nevertheless, those born to wander still suffer sore soles and fatigue, but only seek the smallest of comforts; the grandiose sickens them, but what do they need, those that have never known want? It’s easier to know what they don’t want. They don’t want people who are a mirage of real; those that are heat-haze on the horizon who disappear when the sun goes down. They don’t want sympathy for hardships imagined by those that know them not. They don’t want love for sale, a love purchased that costs too much without value. But I do know what every nomad I’ve met wants, and it’s the hardest of things to attain. They want a love that cripples then strengthens their resolve to carry-on their trek, whether that love walks with them or not, and in most cases it was not. It’s this kind of love, they said, that goes everywhere you go, where it’s somewhere only you know, never to degrade like those bones in the sand; those plinths and weathered statues dedicated to mighty emperors not remembered and shorn of their renown. Without that kind of love here, they said, tapping their chest, you’re in a desert of your own making.