I used to have a name. Sometimes, in the depths of night when even the stars hide their faces, I try to remember it. The syllables dance at the edge of consciousness like moths around a dying flame, but they never land. Perhaps it's better this way. Names are for people who matter, for those who leave marks upon the world. I am nobody now, and nowhere is where I belong.

The rain falls through me as much as around me these days. Each drop should be cold against my skin, but I've forgotten what cold feels like. I've forgotten what anything feels like, except this hollow ache that has become my only constant companion. Even pain would be welcome now – at least it would mean I'm still here, still real in some fundamental way.

I remember fragments of before. A house with blue shutters, or were they green? A dog's bark echoing down a suburban street. The smell of coffee from a kitchen I can no longer picture. These memories feel like they belong to someone else now, some other man who knew how to exist in the world of people and purpose. That man died somewhere along the way, though I couldn't tell you where or when. Death implies a finality I wasn't granted – instead, I simply faded, like old photographs left too long in the sun.

The forests I walk through now are different from the ones in my memories. These trees have eyes that follow my meaningless journey, their bark scored with faces of others like me – the forgotten, the lost, the nobodies who wandered too far from the light of belonging. Sometimes I trace these faces with fingers that might as well be mist, wondering if they too once had names, homes, people who wondered where they went.

I came across a child's abandoned teddy bear once, propped against a rotting log. Its button eyes stared at me with more purpose than I've felt in years. Someone somewhere was missing this bear, searching for it perhaps, feeling its absence. What a strange thing, to be missed. To have someone notice the space where you used to be. No one notices the spaces I don't fill anymore.

The mountains here are endless, their peaks cutting into the perpetually gray sky like broken glass. I climb them not because they're there, but because the effort should hurt. Should make my muscles burn, my lungs scream for air. Should make me feel something, anything. Instead, I float up their slopes like morning fog, insubstantial and temporary. Even gravity has given up on holding me to this earth.

In the valleys between these jagged mountains lie fields of what might have once been wheat, now gray and lifeless as everything else in this nowhere place. The stalks don't bend when I pass through them. Nothing bends for me anymore. I am less than the wind, less than a shadow, less than a memory of warmth on a winter day.

Sometimes I find others like me, shadows of people walking their own paths to nowhere. We never speak – what words could possibly matter here? Instead, we pass through each other like ghosts, each contact a reminder of everything we've lost. In their eyes, or where eyes should be, I see the same emptiness that has made a home in my chest. We are all nobody here.

I remember love, or at least I think I do. The way it felt to hold someone's hand and know they wanted you to. The sound of laughter that meant you were part of something larger than yourself. The warm weight of belonging settling around your shoulders like a favorite coat. These memories cut deeper than any knife could now, each one a reminder of how far I've fallen from the world of the living.

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There was a job once, I think. Papers on a desk, meetings in rooms with windows looking out on a city I can't name anymore. Deadlines and projects and goals that seemed so vital then, now floating away like autumn leaves in a stream. What was it all for? The thought makes me laugh sometimes, a sound like dry leaves scraping across abandoned parking lots. All that striving, all that stress, all those moments spent worrying about things that didn't matter even then.

The creeks here run with water that might be tears. I sit beside them sometimes, watching faces form and dissolve in their dark surfaces. Faces I should know, should remember, should miss. Family maybe, friends perhaps, lovers possibly. They blur together now, like water colors left in the rain. Each one a reminder of connections lost, bonds severed, ties cut by whatever slow death brought me to this nowhere place.

Nights are the worst, though time has little meaning here. In the darkness, the emptiness inside me seems to grow, reaching out to touch the vast emptiness of the sky. No stars shine here – they know better than to waste their light on nothing and nobody. Instead, the darkness wraps around me like a shroud, familiar as an old friend, unwelcome as a chronic pain.

I try to remember music sometimes. The way a favorite song could lift your heart or break it, how rhythm could move through you like life itself. But the only music here is the whisper of wind through dead trees and the distant sound of others like me, shuffling through their own endless journeys to nowhere. Even humming feels wrong now, as if I've lost the right to make any mark upon the silence.

There are cities here, or things that look like cities from a distance. Glass and steel rising from the gray earth like the bones of ancient beasts. I avoid them now. The emptiness there is different – sharper, more deliberate. The nobody that I am feels too raw, too exposed in those streets where purpose once lived. Better to stick to the forests and fields, where at least the emptiness is honest about what it is.

Sometimes I find traces of others who passed this way before me. A shoe half-buried in mud. A wallet with pictures turned to blank paper. A phone that hasn't worked in years. Each item a story I can't read anymore, a life I can't understand. I leave them where they lie – disturbing them would mean acknowledging they matter, and nothing matters here in nowhere.

I've forgotten how to sleep, though sometimes I rest. Leaning against trees that feel no more solid than I am, I let the gray world blur around me. In these moments, memories of dreams come back to me. Dreams of being someone, of having somewhere to go, something to do. Dreams of mattering. They hurt worse than nightmares ever could.

The gray fields stretch endlessly before me now, a canvas painted in shades of nothing. I walk because stopping would mean accepting this is all there is, all there ever will be. At least movement creates the illusion of purpose, even if I'm going nowhere. Always nowhere.

This is what becomes of those who lose their way, who step too far from the path of being someone. We fade, we drift, we become nobody. Our stories end not with bangs or whimpers, but with slow dissolution into the nothing that waits for us all. I am nobody from nowhere, and this is my story that no one will read, my song that no one will hear, my life that no one will mourn.

Perhaps somewhere, in some other world, there's still a space where I belong. A chair that waits for me, a bed that remembers my shape, a heart that notices my absence. But I can't find my way back there anymore. The path is lost, the breadcrumbs scattered, the light gone out. So I walk on through this endless gray, this eternal nothing, carrying my nowhere like a crown, wearing my nobody like a second skin.

And sometimes, in moments when the gray almost breaks into color, when the nothing almost becomes something, I think I hear my name on the wind. But it's just another lie the nowhere tells its children, another false hope in a place where hope came to die. I am nobody now, and nowhere is where I'll stay, walking these paths that lead to nothing, until even the memory of being someone fades like footprints in the rain.

After all, that's what nobodies do. We walk. We fade. We forget. And eventually, we become the nothing we've been searching for all along.