Edinburgh is a city that knows its own raw mystique but doesn’t brag about it. The magic is taken in stride: The gothic spire of the Sir Walter Scott Monument, the stark beauty of Edinburgh Castle looming on the cliffside, the sprawling rocky green of Arthur’s Seat, the mists that seep through everything in the early morning—these are the heart of Edinburgh, but thought of by locals as little as you think of your own pulse.
The hostel I was staying in was the best I’d found, the Caladonian. The beds were the same spring-jabbing sorts you always found, the dorms packed with the same eleven strangers (five drunk, two giggling, one who’s always there sleeping). But it was better. The breakfast was hearty (muesli, coffee, orange juice, toast, oranges, apples), the common areas expansive (a lounge, bean-bag cinema, bar, kitchen, reading room, pool hall), the staff friendly, and the WiFi stable.
I needed money. I was meant to have returned in July, but when my plane home took off I wasn’t on it. It was September, and I had run out—of everything, on everything, on everyone. Freelancing could pay the bills if only I could convince myself to do the work, but my focus was fractured, split between my numbed sense of isolation and the white-hot thoughts of the girl I had longed to come home to. Thoughts of a home I believed no longer existed.
It felt like melodrama from the inside too.
I was down to half a pill.
I sat in the corner of the kitchen typing away, trying to work, reminding myself to breathe, reminding myself that I had to do this work if I wanted to keep moving—keep wandering—keeping running away.
Doro saw me from across the room. “I was fascinated by you,” she would later say, words lathered in a combination of German and American accents. Everyone outside of England spoke American English; they’d learned it all from Hollywood.
Some girls are subtle about expressing an interest. Your eyes meet, they smile, their head lowers to the side—abashed, the play-act goes, by your willingness to look their way. Some are so subtle they nearly disappear.
Doro was not subtle.
It was hard not to notice her eyes resting on me from across the room. She approached me to ask if she could borrow a pen, which would have seemed more like a solid excuse if she hadn’t already been staring at me for the better part of half an hour. She returned the pen, made an attempt at a joke, but I pocketed my pen and didn’t laugh. “Thanks again,” she said, and skittered away.
Doro seemed oddly familiar. She looked like a girl I knew once, years ago. They had the same hair, the same faces somewhere between heart-shaped and round, the same jagged scars along their arms.
Later that night, I sat on a leather couch at the hostel bar next to Doro. She bought me a drink, a ginger beer with a Scottish thistle on its label. Doro and I talked about books and knives. We talked about the scars on our arms. We joked about patterns and pictures and how no one ever cuts themselves in clever ways. I pulled the camping knife from my pack and used the tip to lightly etch the picture of a squid into my forearm.
Why am I doing this? I looked at the light trails of blood lifting up from the barely-broken flesh. Who the hell am I?
Doro and I watched a movie in the bean-bag cinema. Her interest was obvious, but I kept my distance. I tried to understand why I stayed so far away. Doro said she was going to bed. I said okay, said I was going to watch another movie. She walked out then back in a minute later. “It’s four in the morning,” she said. “I’ve decided I may as well stay up until breakfast.”
Doro was not subtle.
During that second film, I invited her to cuddle in next to me. Sometimes she would pull in close, like she wanted to roll together across the bean-bag hills. Sometimes she would pull away like she wanted me to let go of her, like she wanted to run from the room.
Everything I felt was tepid, shallow, like a stream still learning how to be a stream. The movie couldn’t hold me. Doro’s tugs and pulls kept fragmenting the moments. I was paying attention; when is she holding in close like it means something? when is she moving like she wants to escape?
I wonder how her heart was playing in her chest just then. Days later she would approach me and take me by the wrist, sliding my fingers across her throat until they settled into her racing pulse. “Do you feel that?”
When she pulled in close, I rested my forehead into her temple. “Hey, could you tilt your head? I think I’d like to bite your neck for a while.”
Yeah. I wasn’t subtle either.
She was flustered for a moment, but then shifted her entire body position to give me access. My teeth searched for a place where they could really sink in, but I couldn’t find one. She would turn her head away to give me access to the soft skin of her neck, would turn toward me to fiercely snare my lips. The movements continued their rehearsals while I wished the kisses felt like something more than her lips pressing into my wax body.
I wanted to feel like it could feel good just to feel wanted.
That night, groping in the dark, my hands crawling across her skin, trying so hard to make contact—the projector-screen movie humming out electric sounds and muted lights—I felt like drowning.
Loneliness feels like Scotland to me.
There, in the dark, as the morning mists crawled in from the hills and valleys of Scotland—through the raw mystique of Edinburgh that people no longer saw—my lips and teeth and breath and hands tangled with this fascinated stranger, each stroke of my movement a muted scream.
Doro was there for a week. She handed me scribbled notes, wanted to read my stories, told me she wanted to nibble me. I told her I was busy, had to work, had to earn enough money to eat. She bought my time on lease by getting me treacle cookies from the co-op around the corner. We drank Hendrick’s gin together and replayed the same vacant love-scene in the cinema room. We’d learned it all from Hollywood.
She talked to me about flashbacks, about the parts of her past that came back to haunt her again and again—that escalated her heart-rate, set her mind to spinning. I told her she was going over the same story in the same way, over and over, and there had to be another way to tell it. That it didn’t have to be the story of how she was victimized but could become the story of all she survived; not the story of how she was thrown down but the story of how she stood back up again.
Doro started screaming, then cried and left. Through a stunted sense of empathy, I imagined she probably hoped I would give chase, tell her I believed everything would be okay. I didn’t. She came back hours later and asked to talk to me alone. We went into the unoccupied cinema room and she told me the things I’d said were out of line and that I owed her an apology.
“I meant what I said. I’m sorry if it hurt you, but no, I don’t think it was out of line.”
She stepped toward me with a fist balled, the side of her hand and forearm faced toward me. Then her hand dropped and she just cried. Cried in the way people do when it’s not a river-rush but a dam breaking after years of cracks and splinters.
I didn’t say anything. I put my arms around her, and my arms were something different then. We were there for minutes that sprawled out on those bean-bag hills. We didn’t kiss, didn’t touch except in the way I blanketed her.
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