I figured out how to make it downloadable - yay :) I've been having issues with dSound, but once they're sorted I'll put this up there for folks too
Here's the written version of the story for those too lazy to listen.
I Was Here
by A Nomad Soul
I was a boy when I left home. I couldn’t tell you how old I was; the passage of days and years stopped being counted on the day I began my journey. I would like to say that my travels made me a man, but that would be neither lie nor truth. A man may grow old and grow up, but the boy he once was, is never truly gone. I confess, I have thought myself a man on many occasions, and have felt like one on many others. Yet in the times when I found myself alone and in the dark, staring up at the stars but only seeing the black, I have always been just a boy who ran away from home.
You may think me extraordinary, for deciding to walk the Earth. I am not. While it is true that I have seen miracles and nightmares, sometimes in the same instant, and it is true that I have been both a hero and a villain, please do not think I was the deciding factor. When I speak of my travels, I tell tales of the extraordinary – the rest would bore you to an early grave. In truth, the life of a wanderer like me is just like the life of those who stay in their homes: a seemingly endless series of similar days and nights broken up by moments of something different. Time has a way of making us less than we are, and more than we could ever be, but only when we aren’t paying attention to ourselves.
I see no point in starting at the beginning. My reasons for leaving will never matter. What matters are the reasons I have for never going back. Therefore, let us just accept two facts, and then move on. Firstly, I left home one day and decided to walk, on foot, wherever my feet would take me. Secondly, nothing I have ever seen or done, regardless of how beautiful or bizarre, has had any lasting impact on the world at large. I have never been, nor will I ever be, important. Good. Now we can get to the good bits.
The first thing I learned after I left home was how to be afraid. When I set off I thought I was afraid of insignificance, but it was not fear, just arrogance. I was seeking out my destiny and was therefore not afraid of hardship or suffering. Faith has that power. I survived for years, unafraid of what may come my way, simply because I had faith that it would be part of my story one day. I was right, to an extent. Hardship is an inevitable part of our story, regardless of what form it takes. Fear is that small, creeping, crippling thought that takes hold. “There is no way out of this. This is all there is. The dawn will not come.” It took me years to be afraid, and years to be brave again.
I met a man in a city of rubble and dust; a soldier who had lost his gun. He carried his jacket over his shoulder at all times. It was like a burden he had never wished to carry. Other than that, he was as ordinary as the rest of the city’s terrified folk. They lived in the shadows, doing only what was necessary, making excuses not to get too attached to their neighbours. The Gunless Soldier ate like me; as if every meal would be his last. We spoke very little and listened even less, each of us absorbed in our own little plans for the path ahead. It suited us fine. We walked from that city to another just like it, filled with the same kinds of people.
One morning, we prayed in the custom of those around us. I kissed the ground and heard him leave. His jacket, his burden, had been cast off and to the side. He had taken flight.
The ground thundered, the sky fell and I woke up, trapped beneath the ceiling, surrounded by the dead. At first there was pain, agony unlike anything I had ever felt before. I could not move. I could not see. I could not bring myself to speak. Pain became hope. I could still feel; I was still alive. It would only be a matter of time before I was found. This was only a part of my story.
The warmth of the day became the cold of night. Nobody came.
The darkness beneath that roof was absolute. I clung to hope, held on to faith; there was nothing else. And then came a thought. A single, simple thought. “There is no way out of this. This is all there is. The dawn will not come.” I was, finally, afraid.
I don’t know how I managed to cry out, to scream with the fury of a terrified child, in spite of my desperation to simply continue breathing. But I did. I didn’t stop screaming.
The rubble shifted and I was greeted by the cold blue that ushers in the dawn. It was only a crack. My eyes met those of a little girl. Her face embodied all the innocence and curiosity I had long since lost. I had to use the last of my strength to utter two feeble words: help me. The face disappeared and I heard the faint sound of a little girl calling out to her papa.
When I came to, I found myself in a sterile, white bed, no longer trapped in the mosque, but still unable to move. I would never see that little face again, outside my dreams. In time, I learned to walk again. Soon after, I ran from that city of rubble and dust, and never looked back.
I had learned to be afraid, but I had yet to learn how to love. When wandering the wastes, it is natural to become lonely. Solitude was the single aspect of my travels that seldom changed. Yes, people joined me sometimes, and other times I joined others in their adventures, but my path was always a lonely one. I think I preferred it like that. You would think that, in a world so vastly populated and so diverse, there would be no shortage of people on my travels, and that is true, to an extent. I was often surprised to find people in the places that I went, but there they were. However, I remember long, vast, almost unending stretches that held no soul but mine.
I passed through wild forests, traipsed along untamed coasts and hiked over mountain passes; many of them untouched by the hand of man. And yet, even in those places that had never been seen through human eyes before mine, I could feel the ever-present force of life. It made solitude bearable, at times even enjoyable. When surrounded by so much life, it is hard to feel truly alone. And so it was that I did not understand loneliness.
That was until I walked through the desert.
The heat and the cold of a desert are the complaints of those who refuse to come to terms with its most terrifying truth. A desert has nothing, and no one. If life is present, it is not a desert, merely an arid region of time and space. I journeyed through a desert, for three days and nights, finally understanding true loneliness, and it scared me half to death. I was surrounded by the echoes of life that never was, driven half mad by the thought that this was the ultimate end of humanity, considering the futility of life itself, when I came upon a hotel.
It looked more like a large shack, like it was both in defiance, and at the mercy of the winds that howled through the sands. It was not an oasis, and I soon discovered it was not a mirage. Inhabited by runaways, outcasts, and the dregs of humanity, the hotel was called The Lantern. They took me in, gave me food, water and a bed and refused to tell me how they had come to be there.
I met a woman who had lost her name. She said she had once been a lady of the night in a city of glass and light. Her face was scarred and her body disfigured, but she wore it without shame. She told me that she had chosen to run, but only once she could no longer fight. I confess that I still don’t know what she meant, even though I could see that it was true.
She loved to draw and paint and sing under her breath. I consented to a portrait, a nude study, which still makes me blush. Every time I look at it, I realise that she saw a beauty in me, just as I was, and she poured that out upon that small scrap of paper, unashamed and unafraid. She did not seek my validation, she did not seek my admiration and yet she was genuinely pleased that I liked her work, for no other reason than because it made me happy. She showed me how to love, and I loved her for it. This woman, who had lived a life where her perceived value was mere currency, who had chosen to fight and lost, who had run away, not for fear of death, but in the hope of a new life, became the most beautiful person I would ever meet.
I could have stayed in that hotel and lived out my days among the lost and broken ragdolls that the world had tossed aside, but it was not to be. I was spirited away one night, loaded onto an aeroplane as I slept. The next light I saw was the light of a new sky. I miss them, the ragdolls of The Lantern, and I miss her, the Broken Lady of the Night.
The hardest lesson I had to learn, the one that took me the longest, was to listen. When I took it upon myself to walk the Earth, I was determined to have a story to tell. I was convinced that when my journey came to an end, I would be able to enchant and enthrall people with all that I had done. That was why I left – to become a legend, to be the Man Who Walked the Earth. I discovered, after trying to tell my story countless times, that my part in my adventures was, in the end, the dullest and most boring. I would inevitably bore any audience with my ego, because I have always been utterly unremarkable. The stories that mattered, the stories that thrilled and fascinated children and adults alike, were never my stories, but the stories of the people I had met, and the places I had been. It was only when I learned to listen to the world around me that I finally ended up having something to say. Eventually, I discovered that the world is bursting with stories that are begging to be told, to be heard. That is why I never returned home.
I could tell you a thousand stories, and then a thousand more. None of them are mine. The street-side preacher who lugged around a sack of sand, just so that he could tell those who jeered where to put their heads. The village where no one could live beyond the age of eighteen. The boy who spent his days looking for lost dogs to take back to their homes. The old man who had been searching his whole life for a girl he had once seen at a café. The miner who was both claustrophobic and terrified of the dark. The singer who was executed in front of twelve thousand people because she had dared to question her government in public. I am not extraordinary.
I have seen miracles and nightmares, sometimes in the same instant. I have been both a hero and a villain, but only in the smallest and most insignificant ways. Of all the bizarre and beautiful experiences that have shaped my life, please do not think I was the deciding factor.
I have long since stopped walking. My soles have grown old and tired. As I look back on all that I have seen, all I remember are the faces that told the stories. In the end, our names will be lost to the sands, and so will our stories. Humanity is a memory that will eventually fade, and I am but a droplet in the ocean of that memory. I am okay with that. But before I go, before I fade into the endless darkness of time, I wish to say just one thing.
I was here.
For those with an itch for more #fiction, check out:
My Himitsu by me, because you can download it now, and it's one of my favorites so I want everyone to read it.
Historia de Filia ex Machinis:
A collaborative writing experiment between 
Part 1
Part 2
The Devil's Letter by 
and before anyone goes 'but they're past their payout date!', I would like to say this:
Just coz a post is past payout, doesn't mean it ain't worth reading.
Peace, Love and a Little Madness
Nomad