WHERE AM I?

When I look at Hartlepool, now often as a visitor, I feel lost. Where do I belong? I have abandoned the town; I am abandoned by the town. Yet I am bound to it.

It's darker now, I’m approaching the sea, and its cool breath grows louder in my ears. It hushes and reassures me that it will always be there.

Hartlepool will always be the landscape of my past and the home of the people I love; my heartland is Hartlepool. In a period of indeterminacy for the town, I know it will regenerate.

I’m walking on the beach, this unreliable sand. This pale sun, dulled by the mist, which hovers as a veil of suspended sea, hiding everything. Yet at the same time, magnifying everything, dividing even light into its spectrum.

I am reminded by this mist, that the best part about landscapes is the in-between. The lives only seen by you. The parts hidden from tourists, and only revealing itself to familiar eyes.

That bench is not just a bench, that lamppost is not just a lamppost.

This town is not just a town.

‘But where am I in this?’ I think, as I reflect on all the unanchored places of Hartlepool floating around in my mind. Does the town see me? Do I exist within the folds of the mist? I’m nowhere.

I’m reaching the end of the beach. I’m stopped by the jetty sitting above, looking up at the lighthouse which perforates the mist. I’m smirking at how predictable it is that I feel saved by this sight.

I am here, sprayed across the beach in fragments. Like sea glass which moulds to the form of the pebbles, my memories are scattered amongst the object truth: somewhat rounded and faded. As with the frosted glass, they are obscured by time. But they are there, buried in the seascape.

The seascape is fundamentally always moving and constant, absent and present.

That is my relationship to my hometown also: I don’t exist in this place alone.

I am nowhere, I am here.