It’s October and I’m buried under the question: ‘How do I live when the world is ending?’ I don’t have an answer and so the darkness grows. All summer rain has fallen out of the air; replacing it is the hot-orange glow of leaf-rot. I’m trying to appreciate my new surroundings – I’ve joined St Andrews University for a blissful year of postgraduate study, I have a whole year by the seaside, which means I’m basically on holiday. A year, which I’m crumpling up in my hands like a discarded draft, it’s already floating litter in a dank drain, it’s being dragged under and drowned the longer I dwell, but I can’t seem to stop dwelling, because if I can’t answer the question then how am I supposed to move forward? The world seems to be in a body bag, weighed down by bad decisions and pinned to the bottom and I can’t look away, I won’t look away, but I’m just one human peering into murky waters I can barely make sense of, so what can I do? What can I do? What can I do? Remain immobilised as horrified witness, apparently, until –
Winter graces the landscape with its freezing fingers, making everything crisp, pale and delicate. I’ve never lived by the sea before – previously at home in the undramatic sheep-filled hills of Lanarkshire – so it marvels me every day. I didn’t know the sea could have so many moods, much as I’d read about them. Today, it’s grey and foamy white, like a monochrome filter crashing onto the length of washed-out West Sands with the sky holding heavy-clouded court. I become fixated by it as I peer out the window, up high at the gable end of a house on a hill, my hair and clothes still damp from hurrying in the rain. In front of me, the counsellor holds my question in her hands and, even though she has no easy answers, she relieves my burden. The weight feels bearable, I can see how I might survive, might even get close to living again, I can see –
Snowdrops and daffodils, pinpricks of green on barren branches, warming sunshine and cold wind; the sea is looking bluer again, tentatively getting more vibrant with encouragement from increasing stretches of empty sky. Just as the birds – seagulls, crows, blackbirds – are excitedly starting to gather material for their nests, so too am I looking to the horizon. I’m able to envision it, finally, in both small ways (I might be able to wear my leather jacket instead of a coat next week) and big ones (I can imagine what I’ll be doing after my masters). I’m walking down the pavement curving along the road and whilst before I would blast music in my headphones just to get one foot in front of the other, now I’m listening to the breeze in the hedges, the wood pigeons flapping away from bird feeders, the meow of a friendly neighbourhood cat that I soon crouch to pet. My heartbeat is steady, gentle ideas flutter in my head like butterflies, and I walk to the beach.
Summer is strange. The first day I can go out in a t-shirt turns the landscape into some sort of alien terrain that’s too un-grey to be Scotland yet too wet to be Mediterranean. There’s a delay as I adjust to the brightness, caused by a denial that we’re here already, we’re steadily approaching the second half of the year, when the nights grow and autumn shakes off the sunshine in a grand shower of gold. Before it’s June, it feels like the year is ending already. I face this time uncertainly, as a Busy Time of Happenings, as a Time Before the End. I want to treasure it fully but know I can’t because of my unreliable memory and tendency to constantly be eyeing the future like an old enemy. And yet, when doubt casts its shadow in my mind, when worry taunts from dark corners, I know what to do. Its vastness belittles all monsters, its constant turmoil calms all questions: I look to the sea. And it reminds me the world can seem so big that it has no end, that even if it is ending, I can live.