9 November 2019
As I write this, I have twenty-one days remaining in Edinburgh, almost to the exact hour. On the twenty-third of November, I’ll catch a flight to Madrid, where I’ll stay for three months. I have very little in the way of concrete plans after I arrive; likely I will often wander aimlessly through the city, sit on many trains and buses through the countryside and urban neighborhoods, probably drink more red wine than I should, and hopefully learn a little Spanish and do a little writing. In my most romantic dreams it is all very Hemingway-esque.
In the meantime, however, I am in what I can only call a protracted state of leaving. I have been leaving Edinburgh for at least the last three months, if not longer; it is possible that I have been leaving since I arrived, something which I grudgingly admit is probably a good description of my general state of existence over the past several years.
I seem to always be leaving in the autumn. I left Queenstown in the autumn, which was also the season I first arrived; I left California for Scotland in the autumn, and now once again it is autumn and I’m leaving. Of course, the flip side to this coin is that autumn, for me, is a season of recurring arrival. In many ways this is incredibly fitting for what autumn represents in both nature and in culture: the departure of summer, the harvest, the arrival of winter; the dying of the light, but within that darkness the certainty of rebirth in the spring. Autumn — always my favorite anyways — is the most liminal time of the year; it is the airport terminal of the seasons, and, fittingly, that is where I usually seem to find myself when the leaves begin to turn.
I spent the summer at work here, footsore and sweaty between babbling tables of customers in an iconically old Edinburgh building, all uneven stone floors and low ceilings and narrow stairs and multiple past lives. This one used to be a bakery. I would like to think that the heat of ovens, the smell of baking pastries, and the exchange of money for sustenance in the breakfast cafe that it is now are already familiar and comfortable scenes for these old walls.
The first half of summer I spent all my free time writing job applications. I wrote more job applications than I care to count; I received less job offers than I care to admit. When August arrived — the halfway point in my six-month post-graduation visa grace period, the allotted amount of time I was given to presumably find a job that would provide me with a different visa so that I could continue residing here in Scotland — I panicked. I realized that, given my track record, not only would I likely be unable to find that elusive job, but I also no longer had it in me to even try. I was worn out. I didn’t even want half the jobs I was considering applying for; I just didn’t want to leave. That was the realization: finally, cruelly, I didn’t want to leave, and yet I had to.
August was a strange time. The city filled with festival-goers and rare days of blazing heat and sunlight; I drank cider under the shade of vibrantly green broad-leafed trees; I napped in the Meadows in shorts and a tank top, drunk on the warmth of the air. I also lay awake at night, nearly paralyzed with fear because — in conjunction with the realization that I was going to have to leave Edinburgh, the place I’d lived longer than anywhere else since graduating high school, a place that had become my home — I had no idea where I was going next. I spent a lot of time feeling like I couldn’t breathe. I spent a lot of time on the phone to my mom.
There was more I could have done to stay. I could have applied for more jobs; I could have applied for more internships; I could have applied for more Masters programs at the university here. At a certain point, though, I just didn’t want to, because it felt like the place didn’t want me. I realize that this is purely romantic projection on my part: places are not lovers, to spurn and be spurned in turn. But I struggled through the hell of post-graduate job applications, and I took a trip to Spain, where I remembered that other places existed outside of Edinburgh (good places, with more sunshine), and then I spent a lot of time alone, walking around the city and parks and countryside, and I made the choice to let the leaving happen. So now it’s autumn, and the leaves are turning, and in twenty-one days, almost to the exact hour, I’m leaving.
I have given myself a lot of grief over the past several years regarding my own uprootedness. When I returned to California from New Zealand and struggled to readjust to life as a full-time university student in one of the most crowded regions of the United States, I didn’t cut myself much slack. I felt like a failure for being unhappy. I’d gotten everything I’d dreamed about over the previous year, tired of living out of a backpack and feeling intellectually under-stimulated in Queenstown: a home base near family, a place at one of the best public universities in the nation, and a good part-time job tutoring other high-achieving students. If I couldn’t be happy when everything seemed so perfect, then maybe I was doomed to a lifetime of unhappiness; maybe — and this was my deepest fear, the one I didn’t even really talk about in the counseling sessions I started attending — maybe there was something wrong with me, something insidious and inescapable.
All I really wanted to do in Berkeley was leave. I found bits of brightness there — bits that I am endlessly grateful for now, because they represent people that became some of the best friends I’ve ever had, and moments that became cherished memories — but at night I listened to the train go by outside my house and I wished with every single cell in my body that I was on it. When I decided to move to Edinburgh, a highly informed decision which took me many weeks of painstaking contemplation, I internally took this as proof that I was a rotten escapist who would be running from her demons the rest of her life. I convinced myself that my desire for mobility was my curse and my greatest character flaw.
I arrived in Edinburgh and waited for my demons to catch up. I felt sure that they couldn’t be far behind; perhaps they’d just missed the final call for boarding on my flight, but had caught a red-eye the morning after and would be showing up at the doorstep of my new flat any minute now. I waited some weeks: nothing. I found that here, in Edinburgh, I felt mostly calm. I enjoyed my first autumn here immensely, and fell hard for the golden light filtering through the leaves. When my demons did finally arrive, they did so without great racket: I had bad days, occasionally restless sleep, a panic attack or two. I didn’t listen to any trains at night. When I watched airplanes in the sky, I did not urgently wish to be on them going elsewhere.
I was thrilled; I was feeling the flush of new love. (Places are, perhaps, more like lovers than we think). I had found somewhere that I felt I could stay indefinitely; maybe I had been cured of whatever rotten thing had sent me running from Berkeley, tail tucked between my cowardly legs.
This was my inner narrative. It has taken me until very recently to even consider the possibility that perhaps there was never anything within my desire for mobility — or even simply for a place which better suited my tastes and lifestyle — that needed to be cured in the first place. The last six months have been some of the most tumultuous of my life, within a period of several years that have borne witness to great change. Several times I felt the urge to leave, and twice I did: once to Ireland, and once to Spain. Both times I came back, which felt like a given; Edinburgh was home. I sat still with my tumult and looked at it very hard and found that it was a different thing to that other thing which makes me long for movement. The two had become very muddied up in each other, because that is what depression and anxiety do: they muddy.
Several months ago, as I was sitting in one of Edinburgh’s many lovely cafes, a man at the table across from me leaned over and asked me what image came to my mind when I thought of creativity. He told me that he was writing a book about how to tap into your own creative power, and was trying to design the book cover. I thought for a moment and then said, movement. A train, a plane, a car, a person walking, a person riding a horse, a person riding a bike. I told him this was where I felt most creative: sitting on a train chugging through the autumnal countryside somewhere between Germany and Belgium, walking alone through the Meadows or the Pentlands, staring out the back seat window of my parents’ car as a child. I have been writing travel stories my whole life: not necessarily because all of my stories are about travel, but because I have dreamed most of them while traveling, even if just on the short journeys between Santa Cruz and the Sierra Nevadas for summertime camping trips. Is this a rotten thing? No. Of course it is not.
As a person in my early twenties, breathless with the newly minted independence of young adult life — and especially the feeling of vastness which comes from testing that independence ten thousand miles away from home — I often struggle with knowing how to trust my own choices. I’m not sure yet how best to tell when I should stay and fight or when I should leave and move on, rest and regroup; this goes for jobs, degrees, relationships, and places. I think I will probably be trying to figure this out for many more years, possibly the rest of my life. Learning how to be a whole person in a broken world is difficult, and there is no one to tell you how to do it. But during the process of learning how to be at home with myself, I have forgotten to give myself any grace, and I have forgotten what should have always been a cardinal rule: that I should never pour poison into the well of my own creativity.
In an essay about paddling his kayak from Cape Cod to Nantucket, Paul Theroux describes his use of dead reckoning, or navigation using only one’s average speed, true course, and last known location, as “traveling hopefully into the unknown with a little information.” “Dead reckoning”, he writes, “is the way most people live their lives, and the phrase itself seems to sum up human existence” (2011, p. 65).
I think he is probably right. All we can know is where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, and what is immediately around us; all else is conjecture. We do the best we can with that, and must forgive ourselves for the rest.
Soon, I’ll arrive in Madrid, where I get to spend the next three months with two of my best friends from childhood. The reality of the three of us convening in Spain has hardly hit me yet, but when I really stop to think I have to laugh at the utter ridiculous joy of it. In my overwhelming grief and exhaustion over leaving a place I don’t want to leave, I grew blinders that prevented me from seeing the beauty of the situation: the things I was gaining, rather than only what I was losing. And really, what am I losing? I would hazard a guess and say: hardly anything. I will not lose the friends I’ve made here, of that I am sure. I won’t be losing Edinburgh itself, either; the city has been here for centuries and shows no signs of packing it in anytime soon. It will always be here to return to. I might be tempted to say that I am losing the experience of living here: the warm, sweet smell of the breweries in the crisp morning air, the unexpected glimpses of Arthur’s Seat between buildings, the way the stones gleam and glow and steam in the sun after rain. But even that I won’t lose completely. I’ll simply take it with me. “Anyone who wishes to be strong needs only to remember,” Theroux writes. “Memory is power” (2011, p. 21).
I know that despite this I will still cry when I have to say goodbye to this place, because it has been unimaginably special to me. In a world that feels increasingly desperate, I have felt myself clinging to concrete moments — the sound of a busker’s song echoing off the buildings, for example, or the feeling of deep belly-laughter with coworkers who became friends, or talking to my dad on the phone while walking home through the Meadows on a clear, cold evening, or eating salt-and-vinegar potato chips for lunch every day on a road trip around the wild northern coast. I think that these kinds of moments are the only ones we really have, and this place has given me so many. But I didn’t know what Edinburgh would be to me before I came here, and neither can I know what Spain — or any other place that comes after — will be in the future. And that’s the thing that makes me long for movement, the thing that keeps me writing, the thing that makes me glad to be alive: the sweet possibility of future beauty.
Over a year ago I arrived in Scotland, kicking my bags along the dusty airport linoleum, frayed and full of hope. Welcome home, said the border guard as he stamped my passport, and home it became. I am lucky to have come to understand home as a state of being rather than a single place — a feeling, a certain slant of light, the comfort of a familiar smell. I am also lucky to have called many places home, and to have been born into a life that allowed me the privilege to do so by choice. I left a part of myself in each of them, and took a piece of each with me when I left. I have a patchwork quilt for a heart. I am sure that I will continue to pick up scraps of colorful cloth along my way, and add them on with loving stitches, and my quilt will grow heavy and warm.
Theroux, P. (2011). Fresh-Air Fiend. London: Penguin Books Limited.
SGBRSH 