Highland Vignettes

West Sands Beach, St Andrews.  

The sky, sublime, is blanketed with heavy, dark clouds rolling out to meet the water, as cruel and cold as it is. The sand is littered with as much debris as the last time, shells and seaweed discarded everywhere, rejected by the sea. 

I was with you when I was here last. You pocketed the seashells you thought most beautiful, to give to me before I left – though you forgot to give them to me. When I did leave, their absence in my pocket only twisted the knife that was my absence in your arms. You’re absent today, too. It’s been a long time since I loved you. 

As the water meets the sky at the horizon line, I wonder if we’ll meet again, somewhere full of light and far away from the world. I miss you, as the receding tide must miss the shore it departed from – but I know now that’s not the same as loving you. Last time we were here, you held me close and told me about your last class on Virginia Woolf. As my vision pools into the water, today your words return to me with sharpest clarity – how she filled her pockets with rocks, and waded out into the water, leaving nothing behind but her words.  

Everything has gone from me but the certainty of your goodness.  

I wondered at the time if I loved you like she’d loved him – her husband, to whom she  wrote. I think I did. That shining light which sits on the horizon line, between stormy sky and  sadistic sea – it must come from somewhere. There was a time when I felt like I was  drowning without you, crushed in cruel watery hands as cold as my eyes, reflected in yours, when I told you I no longer loved you. 

It was a lie at the time I said it.  

The beach is always reclaimed by the tide, too soon. I’m just glad that, for a short time, you were mine.  

Balmoral Estate, Queen’s Building (staff quarters).  

I went out for a smoke at around 6 am. The house hadn’t quite woken up yet, but the trees felt like company. Two little robins chased one another in circles, frantic and free, as my thoughts chased one another endlessly, a flightless flurry of my own. 

The birds settled, and one called its song to me, beckoning insistently from the grass, it  seemed. But as I tapped off the ash, it was gone – though its same song seemed to call to me from another direction.  

It was foggy, and my smoke mingled with the burgeoning sunlight. I felt as if I were made of the same substance as the scene around me, transient and intangible, steeped with the feeling that nothing really lasts. I imagined myself melting into the fog, as though it could contain me, only for a strong gust of wind to erase me – I’d be a bit less flightless, and a bit more free. 

My thoughts bore pernicious sentiments, really, though I let them linger just the same. I, too, let myself linger past my place in the scene, my cigarette stubbed out and forgotten. I walked up to the largest tree in the garden, a great oak which I thought must feel awfully lonely, towering above all those around it, its sight obscured by the mist.  

I had only a thin dressing gown to ward off the cold, but I stayed out anyway, almost as if I was waiting for something. I was craving some sort of revelation, I think, for someone or  something to tell me how to be – how to breathe, when to blink, what to say and what to think. I’d have valued certainty of how to live and who to be far more than my own agency – I wanted that great hand of God to scoop me up and show me everything.  

But I felt His absence everywhere, and knew He wasn’t going to help me. No – I was quite  alone, but for distant birdsong and the great oak before me, the leaves of which were beginning to brown and fall down like so many escaped possibilities. 

My tree of loneliness.  

Confronting your life is a task you undertake alone – it’s like pressing your palm against the mirror just to see if you can touch your own reflection through the glass. And I knew in that quiet moment, touching my palm against the raised bark of my solitary tree – the robin still singing, almost imperceptibly – that it was a task I was capable of. I was ready to lay myself bare and examine all the pieces, and put myself back together in an image I could bear to live with. I needed to – and before the last green leaves turned to brown on the lonely tree.  

With this knowledge, I turned my back on the scene, on that tree, so much wiser and older than I, grateful to be a rootless thing; to see things it’ll never see, still there, static and lonely. 

I closed the front door and shut out the scene.  

Beth’s little flat, Aberdeen. 

The floor outside was strewn with cigarettes and remnants of the night before. It was that point in the Summer when the sun never really sets, and the night neither seemed to start  nor end. 

I might not have slept, I realised, sitting on her back doorstep in the early hours, after the party had dwindled down and most had returned to their own homes. John and Lucy were passed out on the couch inside, and I didn’t want to disturb them.  

It had become a sort of home for us, that flat, a halfway house which took in my friends and I each week when work was over, and we felt desperately the urge to be anywhere else. Beth was kind, more so than anyone I’d ever really known. She was the sort of ultra maternal woman who should’ve had kids but for whatever reason never got around to it – adopting the likes of us instead. 

I’d been thinking a lot about what home really means around that time, when friends began to feel like more than friends, and the highland air didn’t bear so sharply that taste of unfamiliarity. That distant place I was bound to by blood, by my parents and my brother, I thought less and less of it every day.  

It was morning, and the sky was bright, with the sparsest tendrils of white cloud. Beth’s pug, Isla, spun in circles around the patio, kicking up dust and ash, untrained and always with a  manic glint in her eyes. How she was still awake after being kept up all night I didn’t know – perhaps, like me, she was still fuelled by the energy of the night before, which seemed to radiate from each brick in the wall, rather than dissipate. 

Nothing ever really seemed to die at Beth’s place – no party at least. The rooms seemed to hold on to the presence of anyone who’d ever entered; whichever of us was visiting, we’d  always feel the presence of the others. I think that’s what a home is, where dead bricks and old paint are alive with memories and moments of joy. I felt that more there than I had anywhere else, and silently thanked God for what the Summer gave me.