Bug Unit

Today is a typically gray Scottish day, and as I write this I am overlooking what could be described as my ‘garden’- a quaint little gray river, stark trees and some adventurous grass that has the indecency to be green in what purports to be spring but is still, let’s face it, winter.

Becks and Alana, the two previous inhabitants of Powderhall Rigg, have just left. They have been sleeping on the couch on and off since we moved in on the first. Their sudden departure in, fittingly enough, a Big Yellow Taxi, has put me in a musing mood.

Becks and Alana have lived in this house for more than a year. As foreign and strange and different to home as it is, it has become a place that they think of as home, a place that you come back to every day. A place that becomes home so much so that they now feel sad leaving it to return to Australia. They spent Christmas here, and began their own traditions, much like you would when starting your own families. They put down roots, threw parties, met friends and lovers, worked and sang and drank and laughed, and yet all their things that signify their experiences fitted neatly into backpacks and boxes and bags, and as long as they had been here, in the next minute, with a phone call to a taxi, they were gone.

When Kyle and I first arrived in Edinburgh, we discussed how strange it was that everything so foreign would soon be so familiar, the roads that we got hopelessly lost in are now navigated with ease. And yet, every day I hear a bagpipe or see a tiny shop alongside a cobbled street, and remember how far away I am. Specifically, I think of the map, and where home is, and where I am.

To be a traveller is to be in a state of transience. Stopovers and unpacking and job hunting and friend-making are all just the illusions that we won’t soon leave this place behind. But we will, in a whirlwind of backpacks and taxis and trains and planes, soon a whole life lived is packed neatly into the memory box, only to be related in stories and photos and other trinkets, because nobody you meet in the next place will ever understand.

But then again, you can live in the same house, on the same street corner, going to the same job year in, year out, and still have memories and images and other lifetimes lived or unlived that your nearest and dearest can’t or won’t understand. Ever.

We are all travellers.