Last days

Memories from a year in Glasgow

13 years ago this week I moved to Glasgow, where I lived for almost exactly one year.

Intimacies from this time:

The strange grey and white cube of the flat, the red plush throw that I got from Primark to put upon it, on my first day, in an attempt at cosiness. Cheap tea-lights. First try at homemaking. Pesto pasta. The throw tracked fluff everywhere.

How I would jog, spooked, in my uniform in the early dawn of the burgeoning summer on my way to my 5am shift at a coffee chain in the city centre. It was so quiet for the first two hours. I was there as the city curled into life, into being, as the first people came in the door. It was a slow waking, my favourite shift.

The building we lived in was nestled between motorway, between warehouses, marooned. In the first week someone came to put down cockroach poison, telling us the building was riddled, but we held our breath and never saw one.

The long strip of the Clyde, my pounding runs next to it, sky and water and walkway merging into marbled grey.

Walking the whole length of the city. Walking around Kelvingrove Park. Walking to the Mitchell Library to write my first ever novel, never published. Walking home, joyful at what I had discovered. That I could sit in a quiet room and make a world. That I might be able to actually do it.

How it felt, so many years later, when a person I loved visited the library and found my books there and told me about it.

How my life felt without knowing this person yet. How it felt to not know what it was like to lose them.

The birthday cake I ate alone over the course of one day in the flat, furtive and feral, cooked for me by my then-boyfriend, who had misread the recipe and put in too much salt, but I didn’t know until I was sick – suddenly, the salt disguised by the frosting. And the shame was mixed up with the salt, the cake almost gone, the cake that should have been shared and savoured, but of course I couldn’t stop myself.

It felt that I was one inhabitant of a deserted planet, but there were two of us. I was unkind, but I was twenty-two and in such terror and paralysis, and I didn’t know what else to do or how else to be.

Back then I was scared that the best parts of my life were already behind me, that I had stalled before even getting going, and then I abandoned my life in a state of panic, and in the abandonment my life was able to become what it is now.

Sometimes now I worry the best is behind me, again, though of course it feels different. I am a person who flees. It’s hard to reconcile. How do I sleep at night? (Badly, mostly.)

Last days. I was memorising the city with my feet, and with my eyes. I walked the now-familiar routes. Every other street, every other building, seemed to have my name. I actually know nothing about my paternal grandfather’s side of the family, the name being all we have, which made it easier to take on resonance.

Last days. First fleeing. An impulsive trip to Shetland with money I didn’t have, no sleep for days, the perpetual August light like eyes kept too wide open. I lay in a hostel bunkbed and no sleep no sleep no sleep. A woman at a pub whose name I can’t remember, but who I will always be grateful to, found me. She saw I shouldn’t be there, so awake and so attuned to the nameless forces of the universe, and she invited me gently to her smallholding, and fed me lentil soup, and took me and a boy who worked on the smallholding to tiny, deserted island full of birds, one you could only access by speedboat. The boy mainly spoke French and we were shy and and sweet with each other. Lapin, we said, pointing. Oiseau.

Crowds of cormorants and gulls rolling, blooming against steep cliff, the sound incredible. I took so many photos of them with my heavy camera, but I don’t know where the photos are now. I used to take photos of everything, but I don’t any more.