I can’t have been to this specific spot for over 20 years. Possibly not since my doings were still determined by my parents, and before walking up to ‘the Tops’ became more of a wish for transcendence.
In my 20s I’d always stick to the roads which cut through this landscape, because I wanted to reach the other side, with a catatonically-charged wish to find a better world at the other side.
What is weirdest is that I remember this landscape more from the dreamscapes, where exaggerated manifestations of it and recurred ever since.
This may be because these vast moors appear out of nowhere next to a busy commuter link road as if you were still dreaming..
The moors are a realm with their own law, their own foreboding threats and their own illusive promises. They possess that which some people find in the sea, or in the desert. These moors are an ‘out there’ specific to the imagination of Northern industrial towns.
It is so tempting to keep climbing up into them, as if you could meet that other world you feel so desperate for.
I play tricks on myself, to conjure something that transcends a reality I feel so stuck in, trying to see ghosts because everything is present up here only in its absence.
It’s the first time in 29 years I’ve seen a pile of rocks the ruins of buildings demolished to make way for the nearby reservoir. Aged 10 I tried to jump from one to the next, slipping and ending up in hospital with concussion.
I have felt threatened by life, fearful of being myself in a state of happiness from such an early age that my deepest idea of ‘true self’ now pictures itself through sadness and solitude. This is the only place I can feel at peace and safe from the perceived threats imposed, demanding I be more than I felt I could be.
It’s hurt being called negative. As the colours faded, as pop songs, that would once punctuate the passing of time, and confirm all purpose to it began to disappear, slowly covered up by a grey mass that promised nothing.
I have been living in a state of unaccepted mourning for most of adulthood, as I have watched life pass me by with increasing desperation. Constantly denying it to myself, watching those my age make lives for themselves get younger and younger; denying it fervently in spaces where other middle aged lost souls would gather for the same reason, of being bereft of ideas of where to be and how to be anywhere else. I showed zero empathy to those I share such a shameful kinship with, constantly trying to tell myself I was somehow only a temporarily embarrassed lost soul.
As I reach 40, my instincts are to panic, to put up the old forms of self-defence, as the atmosphere of our post-covid world becomes ever darker and foreboding, with no sign of letting up yet – and we all must still live in that world.
Perhaps with the act of properly mourning, it’s so seductive to think that one can remain frozen in time here, in the poetry afforded to sadness, but not to the twitching humiliating anxiety that defines life ‘down there’. There is a danger of staring for too long into submerged utopias of impossible escape that I am admittedly free to indulge in up there.
There’s so many me’s I want to love and leave behind, but maybe I daren’t.
The child who banged his head in 1994 on these rocks, or the 19 year old, who 20 years ago, returned home from a very similar North Yorks moorland as an anorexic skeleton from University trip on a course I would abandon shortly after, like many things after. A memory that I identify with so much shame, I daren’t say the name of the place to myself.
Dwelling in memories is so easy at the cost of the present, and I’ve done it so much…..
But I won’t beat myself up – I have never known how to be a body in this world.
I wish I could stay here. Walk and walk and find myself in company, company of this world or not. And I wish I could take this, and implement it down there, and find such peace where I usually finding sweat-stained anxiety.
John B Ledger 