It is one of those days in Scotland where the dawn seems to never stop. The type where the sun rises just enough to turn the sky grey but doesn’t push any harder. Soon, the sky is dark again, as if the whole day was a blurry shot taken from a black and white film camera. It is normally at about three or four in the afternoon on these days, when I’m in my room and I know the best of the day has passed me, that I begin to feel this resignation fall over me. Worse than any Sunday feeling, it’s akin to hopelessness, and it reminds me of Glasgow.
When I was 17, I went there as a university hopeful and I felt a part of my soul click into place. The city had something erratic and charged about it, a rumbling beneath the ground, as if anything could happen at any moment. There was life there, people, particularly many different types of people, and that excited me. Yet the grey sky and the wind that came down from the hills gave me this aching feeling of longing, of desperation. It was not something that I could describe, and when I’d try, everyone else interpreted it as a feeling of doom. It was something akin to that, a sadness, a resignation, a mourning like an army of soldiers trudging to battle or labourers heading to the factory. It was a strange combination of emotions that ultimately made me me realise that this grey city and I were one of the same. The raw truth that I was so different, so unique to the energies of anyone else in my family, made me baulk. So when I got an offer to study at Edinburgh – my sister’s city: a warmer, familiar place – something inside me (youth, cowardice, compliance) made me choose it instead and of course when I lay in bed that night after I’d checked the box on my form, I did what I had to do to survive. I compartmentalised that part of me that sang out to Glasgow and pushed it deep down, turning away from it for good.
Fast forward a decade and the pandemic has hung me out to dry. The choices I made when I was young suddenly becomes evidence of why so many things in my life didn’t work out. Why friends no longer keep in touch, why career paths stalled, and the general feeling of lacking I get in my chest when I wake up. If I could just travel back in time and choose differently, everything would have been fine. As I’m thinking about next steps in my life, a voice in the back of my mind says, ‘Let’s go back to Glasgow. Let’s rectify that mistake we made all those years ago.’
I go back to the areas where the students live and try and feel for my teenage self here, imagining her walking the streets and living in the apartments. It fills me with joy. I feel the wind still carries that chalky feeling of resignation but I’m not afraid of it this time. I work hard, putting in offers for flats, search for jobs, google clubs and groups I could join but months and years pass and I can’t seem to manifest a reality for myself in this city. It’s becoming evidently clear that I might have missed my chance and I start to feel like if this doesn’t work out, I’ll never be free of this feeling that I’ve ruined my life.
The last time I go back to Glasgow, I end up at the main university campus again. I sit on a bench outside a lecture hall and watch the students learn maths on a projector. I can see myself there. I can’t see myself there. I feel lost and out of control. I look up from my hands and see my 18 year old self standing there with my parents. I wonder if it was me that she felt that day? The sadness in me, the confusion, the terror. Has that place in the cloisters become an echo chamber for multiple timelines where I made the same choice? I close my eyes and decide to speak to her. “We had a good time in Edinburgh, didn’t we?” I feel her despair, like she could fall to her knees. “We didn’t choose this place, but it is okay, because we found a great group of friends and we had a great time. You don’t need to dwell here any longer.”
What exactly I exorcised from myself on that day is still a mystery to me but after that moment Glasgow became a city like any other. I am no longer beholden to it and, despite the regret, I am grateful to understand what regret feels like, what denial feels like, and also what forgiveness feels like. So when the grey days come, and that old feeling of despair sweeps over me again, I recognise it, and devoid of any true understanding, accept it as a part of me. I recognise that Glasgow taught me to accept even the darkest parts of myself, the darkest things I’m capable to doing to myself, and then showed me that good things can still happen to me however I choose to handle them.
