“Take this next right.” Marissa is walking dead in front of me, which is unusual for us. Her legs are longer, yes, but she paces them slowly, taking deeply certain steps with each press down of her foot. There’s a couple behind us and then it's just us left on the downhill street. It’s Christmas Day, and Scotland wont snow, but it does rain. My head is covered by a new hat that isn’t doing much to prevent my roots from getting a touch too cool. I’d seen hundreds of them in black and white, fabric beanies with lines that look like bones or electricity running around them. 14 pounds. I bought it. What else was I supposed to do? My mom wouldn’t pick up the phone, and my skin felt bumpy. Marissa and I met in France where we both lived, and both weren’t going home for Christmas, unlike all of our peers, “We should just do something together.” I tell Marissa, balancing a pencil on top of my fingers. It looks for a moment like it will stick, then tumbles loud onto the table in front of us, “Yeah, that sounds good.” She doesn’t look up from her computer.
We’d come to Scotland for god knows what reason. “It was cheap,” Marissa says when I ask, “I’ve always wanted to go to the UK.” When Marissa speaks she looks at you vaguely in the eye, and she shuts hers just slightly. She tilts her head back and forth, and never really leans completely back in her chair. For the most part her back arches, and she looks off to the left side far more than the right. The thing about Marissa is that she was a person so foreign to me. I loved the sound of her laugh, but she lived and dreamed of a separate life. There was a through-line to her, all her angles were carved and her actions measured. One day, before we’d come to Scotland, we were spattered about on the wide road walking next to the trams. There were four of us, and it was inching towards Christmas. There were lights up on every building, and for the most part they didn’t make sense. On top of the Galeries Lafayette was a giant green and yellow dragon. In an alley, built up in some business’ backyard was a towering deer, lighting up the dark corner, “Sometimes I feel like a man, you know. I just woke up and didn't feel like me. I’m just…” I moved my hands, turning to my friends for some inch of similarity. Only one looked at me and nodded, “Their tee-shirts fit perfectly.” She says. Marissa shakes her head and shoves her hands in her pockets. It was in Edinburgh that she looked at me and told me she’d never felt that way before, “I’ve always just been what I am.” I nod my head.
“Well, I guess I feel enough of it for the two of us.”
-
Really all I’d known about Scotland is from Outlander, which I’d only started watching as part of a bit. I guess maybe it goes back to long dredged up Richmond summer, when the heat was pelting down my back, and I felt a lot better with my legs stretched out against a table away from the window than itchy in the grass. I don’t know. My back had a crick in it, and I was laid out on Roy’s couch, with my toes floating backwards and forwards, “Find something to watch.” I’d tell Roy when he got back in the room.
Roy was, like most times, in the kitchen, with his head in some pot, but this pot took the form of the blender. I couldn’t see him, but I could hear the click and the whir of the thing hitting up against the floor and coming back into his living room, “Do you want pineapple?” He yells over it, and I shout back yes, “Alright. I already put some in.” The blender kicks stop, and I hear him bang against the counter, “Don’t worry. Don’t come running. I’m perfectly fine.”
“I’m really comfortable and wasn’t getting up.” I don’t have to yell anymore, and I know he’s coming in, so I bend my knees up and let my feet hover close to the bottom of my butt. He peeks his head around the corner and sticks out his tongue. I roll my eyes.
“Have you found something to watch?” He’s opening a cabinet and pulling something out.
“No. I thought you would..”
“You hate everything that I pick.”
I squeeze my eyes shut, “Fair. Okay.” I lift up the remote and start digging for something to start.
I guess the whole thing starts there.
-
I got to Edinburgh alone on our first day, Christmas Eve. Train from Nantes to Paris, Paris to Paris Beauvais, Beauvais to Edinburgh. Even though I’d arrived in Edinburgh at 5 P.M, the night was stark and black, and from the darkened windows of buildings locked up for Christmas, you could see whipping of the wind against the glass, or along the streets. I’d practically tipped over as soon as I’d gotten off the plane, trekking down the stairs onto the runway, my too full backpack dragging down my spine. A gust of wind rocked right up and split me over to the railing as soon as I’d touched ground. I’d taken my jacket off on the flight, and it was hitched around my arm now. I wish I’d put it on before we left, but now I was on the runway, and our group was walking quickly towards the glass double doors.
“Go on now.” A tall man dressed in dark blue nods his head at us, motioning towards the door. He stood with his knees slightly bent and his shoulders curved in. From the stance of him, he looked like he was making a shield for his chest. There was nothing special about this airport or him and his cropped short hair. He didn’t really look at any of us, the foreigners and locals spewing out of a cheaply priced Christmas Eve flight. He watched sullenly far back behind us, the aching of the planes as they reached towards the ground. Their wheels shuddered and their wings stayed stiff, “Why are we back here?”, they seemed to ask, “Why’d you call us back?”.
“Go on now.” He calls again, louder than before.
-
The hostel Marissa picked was filled to the brim with Australians and strange paired up cliques. I’d dropped my bags in my mixed dorm, which was at that moment infected with eight boys playing a board game loudly, yelling at one another in a language I didn’t understand. Sixteen slept in this room, but currently there were only ten of us. Eight double bunk beds covered almost every space, all separated by stacks of thin lockers painted tan. I tried to shove my bag into the limited space, but wound up uncarefully taking everything out of it and shoving it into the locker, placing my backpack on top.
“They’re so small.” One of the boys has turned from his game to watch me. I nodded and turned away. “You can leave your stuff under the bed if you want to.” He continues. His friends still chatter and spill pieces of their game onto the floor, “Merry Christmas.” He finishes, and I know he’s still watching me as I figure out how to lock my stuff up, “Why are you here on Christmas?” He shoots one more line out at me, and I click the lock closed.
“Didn’t want to go home.” I have a cold and each time I speak I cough right after, he takes notes of this, “Why are you here?”
“We’d nothing else to do.” He motions to his friends, “You can play, if you want to. Do you want to play?” All of them are wearing nothing but black, and they sit with their heels tucked under their bums. I can take a minute to look around the room. It’s sucked full with their large open suitcases. They lay flat underneath their beds, or at the foot of them. One blocks the walkway, another is filled with small plastic baggies of marshmallows. The rest pay no mind to me, and roll their dice for the next turn. They’re speaking much louder than when I entered, and they suck our conversation up into the background.
“I think I’m going to take a walk.” I want to lay back onto my mattress and bend and flex my feet. I want to look at the wall for thirteen minutes and watch my chest rise, “I just got here and it feels like the right thing, yanno?”
He cocks his head, “It’s cold out.” He lets me know, like its the least obvious thing in the world.
-
The point of our trip was not entirely to go see Outlander sites, but everything was closed on Christmas Day, so we figured why not.
“Jamie lived in Edinburgh, right, in season three when Claire comes back?” I ask Marissa over our coffee, safe from the cold and the rain.
“I think so.”
“I wonder if they shot anything here.”
-
“We keep walking down the hill for a while.” Marissa looks back at me then trudges forward. In a split of a second she comes to a complete stop, and turns her whole body to the right, and jabs her finger into the sky, “We’ve got to go there.” From the alleyway, all the buildings are cleared up to the sides, and we can see the top of a large or semi-large hill, too squat to be a mountain, “It looks pretty.” She glances over at me to see if I’m looking, and I nod.
“We’ll go there next.” I shove my hands into my pockets and we walk down the hill in tandem.
“Ah ha! We’re close.” Marissa is looking down at her phone, then back up at the street, “Right there!” She claps her hands together and looks back at me, “That’s it, right?” I step forward and peek into the archway.
“Oh my god. That’s it.”
We stop for a moment at the entrance. It’s sided up to a yellow coffee shop, and a rickety museum. To the back of us is an aged out graveyard with one small white church-like building sitting at the front gate. I jump in a circle.
“Holy shit. History. This is history.” I look at Marissa and she laughs.
“I don’t even like the show that much. I stopped watching it a while ago. I feel like this is one of the last episodes I watched.”
“Well. At least you get the importance.” I walk in.
“Are you sure that's the stairwell?” It looked different in the show, which I suspected it would.
“Perfectly sure.” Marissa is taking off her gloves to take a picture of it.
-
The show itself, Outlander, is not that special. At its core is the story of Claire and Jamie. Claire, who lived out her first 20 years in the 20th century, is thrown back in time to 1745 in Scotland. While there, disoriented and confused, she’s saved by Jamie Fraser’s band of outlaws, and is eventually married to him to save her life. They do not love each other at first. Then suddenly they do. The show functions on the instability of Scotland at the time. Jamie and his outlaws are actively fighting in the Jacobite revolution. They crave freedom from England for their homeland. Claire, a nurse in World War 1, tends to his group, who often look at her as a wicked sort of witch. An evil type of being.
The main tension of the first season is Claire’s love for her husband Frank, who had been separated from her for many years, fighting in the war. Just after their reunion, she’s transported away from him, unable to get her way back.When the opportunity presents itself for Claire to return back to her time, to be with her first husband, to work as a nurse, to live her life of potential stability, she decides to stay with Jamie in his time and begin a life together. The whole affair of the show is their romance. The tender looks Jamie gives Claire, his endearing Sassenach, and how they are always torn apart and brought back together.
By the end of the second season, Claire is pregnant, and Scotland is about to be torn apart by a battle with England that will leave the rebellion, and thousands of Scottish men dead. Jamie urges Claire to leave, half forces her, to protect their daughter. He was supposed to die there, in Culloden, but he does not, and Claire does not find this out until twenty years later. Claire, after raising her daughter and becoming a doctor, returns back to Jamie’s time to find him. They reunite in Edinburgh, at Jamie’s printing shop. The site of which is Bakehouse Close.
In my eyes, I can see where they unhinged the steel railing leaning up the stairs, and unscrewed the gray sign saying keep out. Above the door, there should be a rickety red sign, and in some strange way I half expected a string of other losers standing close to the stairwell. Was I the only one this place mattered to? I turn around and take in the shaded archway that we walked through. A couple stands at the entrance and peeks their heads in looking from side to side. The man, almost 40 in tight jeans, steps in front of his partner, and she pulls her phone out to photograph him against the uneven bricks in the wall. They don’t speak to one another, and when she moves the phone down to her side, he sidles up his coat and continues forward with her.
-
“God. I need to turn this off. It’s horrible.” Roy and I are watching Jamie and Claire’s reunion, and I still like to pretend like I hate it.
“You enjoy it. Stop lying.” He kicks me under the covers.
“It’s too warm in here. Where’s your AC?” I pull his big comforter off, “I’m opening the window.” In the background, I overhear Claire discovering that, after going back to her original time, Jamie had survived. She was going to go back to him.
I pull the window open and turn back. Roy has rolled over on his side, the Switch in his hands. He thumbs quickly, like his hands could guide his whole body. I’ve never seen him with as intense focus as when his eyes are glued to the screen. Sometimes I wonder if he ever cares about anything else, like maybe the long days, the serving, the early morning coffee are just necessary pre-steps to his hand around a controller, his side pressed deep into the mattress. That’s the thing about Roy,
“What are you even playing?” I lay back in the bed without trying for the covers.
“Zelda.”
I go back to watching the show. Claire was going back. Claire was going back. She was zipped into an old dress, she was stepping out onto the streets of his time. She was standing awkwardly outside of Bakehouse Close. She was kissing the love of her life.
“He’s so romantic with her,” I’m laid back down on the bed, watching them reunite. I look over at Roy to see if he’s watching, but he’s still bent over my Switch, running through open land, fighting off a demon. I don’t know what, I was never good at games.
“You could sit up and watch with me.” I’m giving him a test, and I hope he picks it up.
“You know I hate this shit.” He rolls over and faces me, but doesn’t lift his face up from the game. I inhale and look back over at the TV. The episode’s done. Are you still watching, the TV prompts me? You still watching? I fumble through his sheets for the remote and click no.
“I’m going to sleep.” I tell him, and lays the Switch down and kisses me on my forehead.
“Goodnight then.” He lifts the thing back up, and I pull myself out of bed to click the lights off. Even in the dark, we still are lit up by the street light, which shifts in through his blinds. It always disturbs me when I’m almost asleep. At this moment the small spurts of it are hitting him just wrong. His shirt is half up against his back, and his shorts are up too high.
I cross back around the bed and settle into a pillow, pulling the blankets up to my chin. I lay awake for an hour, silent with my eyes closed, keeping track of the click of his fingers against the controllers. I can hear him clearly, but he feels distant against me, even as my toes reach out and try to keep him with me.
-
Jamie does not believe that Claire is real and watches her like a ghost. When she comes close to him he reaches for her gently, but grabs on tight, “Can I kiss you?” He asks her, “I have not done this in a long time.” He whispers before he does it. The music pulls into a bright crescendo, then lulls when they come together. I watch with an open mouth, carefully filing away my distant, fake hatred and distaste for the show. In the moments after watching Jamie and Claire’s reunion, I find it takes over a part of my brain like a squatting tenant. It warps itself thick between normal winded up cords of thought. It inserts itself tight around them, recoding their DNA to look for that one note in every moment. I think about the note that is hit as their heads bend towards one another, the joy and longing it personifies. I think about the run of that melody on my walks to school, when I fall asleep at night. I go back and watch that one scene a thousand times, letting my head drift off to a moment where a hand pulls me close that gently. Sometimes I feel that hand tug me out into a dream, and I drift off into whatever land they’re taking me in the clothes I fell asleep in. I’m always tugging my hair up on top of my head, and following close beside them. The only thing I can make out of the man is the top of his shoulder and the outstretched arm, everything else is a shaking image that I can’t quite get to stop. When I get to keep my mind and my thoughts in the dream, I tell myself that the man is like a shaken Etch-A-Sketch, and the lines of him drip down to the ground like tiny dots of black. There are nights that I don’t want to be dragged out into the open space by him, I want to lay my body on the ground and cut to black. Wake hazily to raw daylight, or the screech of my cat pawing at the bed. Let me sleep, I beg him, but he never says anything back. His arm still calls towards me, and I fall with him onto the grass or stone or dirt of whatever surface he’s brought me out to.
The mornings after he visits me I keep a thick ball in my chest. There are worries that catch themselves tightly in my hands, and I want to escape to a place I can’t reach on my own. It’s the nights after that I wish he would come, and that faint vague heaven would wrap itself around me, but those are the nights he keeps me in the dark, a hollow cold ground beneath me. I always want to wake up from those, and when I do I always want to stay asleep.
-
I climb up the stairs, and Marissa stands below me holding my phone. She’s giggling quietly to herself, “We’re so silly.” The cold is biting against my ankles, which I stupidly left exposed to Scotland air, and the sleeves of my sweater are edging towards damp. The air holds a wetness to it, and the rain comes in tiny waves. In the show, the stairs look old and uneven. I wonder if Claire’s boots click against them. Here in the flesh I notice how simple they are, even if I slip halfway from the rain. There’s a black steel railing that separates me from the ground, and when I reach the top I lean one hand against it and smile wide. Marissa takes a step back, and leans slightly into the air behind her.
“I can’t believe we’re doing this.” I lean over with laughter, and it fills the air with a thick, rich sound. She joins me in an off-key chorus, and I think then about the note again. Somewhere distant, perhaps behind the door behind me, I’m in the room in that scene. I’ve winded down the same road, which looks mightily new now in 2023, but there I’m piled up with wool skirts and a leather boot.
“Now me.” She slowly walks up the stairs as I swiftly walk past her. When we meet, she passes me my phone, “You have to send them to me, though.” Marissa, for once in her life, has a stern solid look on her face, and I want to laugh, but the moment feels wrong.
“I’m the one who always sends them, Rissa.” I station myself in front of her, and I take notice of how the heaviness of her eyes lifts for a moment, and she smiles genuinely. I never catch that face on camera, and I always wonder if I can get it just right. Keep that joy with you on the ground, I want to tell her, but I think it’d make her shrink back.
-
We watched our last episode together sprawled on the floor of the house in Puerto Rico. The night has sifted early, and his legs are burnt to a crisp from his own foolishness. Just an hour before we’d been in the bathroom with a thick long stick of aloe. I rub his legs gently with the cut off stem, and my shower heats in the background behind me. On my knees in front of him, he touches the top of my head and wraps his fingers in the roots of my hair. He hisses with pain at some moments, and I want to tell him off for not taking care of himself. When it hurts the most he’ll lift his heel off the ground and inhale sharply. When I ask him if it hurts too bad he’ll just whisper out a no, and I keep massaging.
It feels like an instant that we’re beside each other then with my legs stretched out on the carpet, and his pressed on top of a towel. He draws small circles on my thigh, and I work hardily with the remote to find the right channel. We’ve made it to the eighth season, and only this once will he watch the full thing with me. He makes fun of Jamie’s hair, then tugs on mine.
“You’re miserable to watch with.” I flick his arm.
“You’re the one who pretends to hate the show.” I want to lean my head on his shoulder, but even that feels too gentle for our relationship. Still, years into our belonging to one another, we sleep distant from each other in every bed we lay in, and our arms barely brush in public. Early on he told me how much he likes holding my hand around others, “I’m proud to be with you.” He tells me on a walk home, “I’ve never liked doing this, but I’m so proud to be with you.”
Where he was once a sweet boy, he’s a tired man, and we merely laugh together in public. We sit opposite of one another. We switch clothes. We hardly touch.
-
When Marissa and I walk out of Bakehouse Close I break down in tears.
“I want to share this moment with him.” I hitch my hips over. We’re walking straight towards the cemetery, and when we make it I lean against the gate. My tears cool my face, and I wipe them off quick with my hands, “We always watched this together.” But that's not quite true, “He’d think it was stupid and funny.”
Marissa has no care for him, but she does for me. She reaches over and rubs my arm. She pulls me into a hug, “I know where you’re at, but this journey you’re on is worth trying. Even if it feels bad. It’s special we’re here together.” I nod my head into her shoulder, then my chest hitches with another batch of fresh tears.
“I don’t feel special to anyone, anymore.” I whisper to her, and she holds me tighter.
“But that's not really true, even if it feels that way.” She releases me into the cold, “We should go climb that hill.” We move towards it naturally.
“Sometimes I feel like I exist in two places. Here and back there.” She nods even though she doesn’t feel that way too, “No one gets it, but I’m always split between.” We’ve crossed the street and headed into another alley, and the rains cut itself away from us for a moment, “It’s not like I even miss it there. I would stay away if I could. I’m just always…”
I can’t get the vision across to her, so I draw it out in my head. We shared a car, and we drifted with the windows down. In the second world the passenger door doesn’t lock, and I can leave it whenever. I know this deep in my bones. There is music on and I am resting my feet on the dash. Roy always tells me not to do this, “What if we get into an accident? You’ll shatter the whole thing.” He swats at them and forces me to take my legs down. The car isn’t moving quickly but the streets fly by in a blur only I can make sense of. In the second world it’s always just before summer, when the temperature hits right against my skin. But the second world doesn’t always stay still. Sometimes it drifts to legs under covers, or feet tapping against a restaurant floor. I let the second world hang in my head like a wreath on a holiday door, and keep it thick and warm with notice and attention. It never goes bad.
-
We make it to the muddy mound, and slip up the trail because we’re woefully under prepared. I keep to the sharp rocks, and balance my weight on each of them, treading away from the mud. I stare down at the ground, and try to keep my new shoes clean, but it's in vain. The mud tracks up the sides of them, and dirties up the hem of my pants. The rains pounding down again, and all around us groups of others are walking at much faster paces with brown hiking boots and long sticks. They turn their heads at us discreetly, then look back at the group around them, communicating in a way they think we can’t discern.
The whole place is green and brown, theres life on the moor, but its not pretty. All around us is just hill after hill. Some hold ant-sized people at the top of them, hands waving down towards us. Others are uncultivated and untouched, acres and acres of green grass made distantly brown from the rain.
Halfway up, Marissa hacks up a lung. She takes two hits from her inhaler.
“We can turn back, you know.” I tuck a strand of hair behind her ear.
“No, no. We’re getting to the top.” She’s looking past me at the groups of people awaiting us.
“Are you sure? I really don’t mind.” She shakes her head and takes off walking. On the muddy walk she takes wide steps, waddles like a penguin.
When we reach the top, Marissa slips and lands on her ass. Every part of her is covered in mud, “We’ll have to do sink laundry.” She laughs, “Merry Christmas to me I guess.”
We stop for a moment at the edge of the hill, Marissa covered in mud, and me with my hands shaking from the cold. We’re drenched in rain, and the air washes against us. I can see out to the water. Homes upon homes fill the space between two smaller moors, and a floor of rocks leads you down towards them. Maybe they have their families down there, radiators on, a kitchen warming the whole downstairs. Marissa looks at me like she wants to go, and I want her to wait one more minute. I tilt my head up to the air and try to force this view into the second world. If I won’t escape it I’ll fill it with everything I know. On top of Allermuir Hill, the two worlds converge in a heinous mess.
Marissa shifts awkwardly beside me, though I can’t see her. Her phone is slathered in mud and is sitting in her bag, so I know she’s silent at my side waiting. Vaguely out in front of me, but invisible to everyone else, brick row houses line the vacant hills. Some of those roofs have rain rot, others serve as encasements for wild communities of mold, or shelter for a yapping dog or tired cat. Long, wide streets separate them, and smatterings of people drift down them on bikes and boards and feet and cars. A hard tug comes in at the front of my shirt, and on the most packed hill-hike in Edinburgh, Scotland, I know that the hand and the arm and the man have come to drift half of me back there. I could, I tell myself, but I don’t. There’s a door somewhere I’m looking for, a handle of silver joy. It’s not at once the the streets disfigure and swallow themselves back into their own world, or even that they do at all. Really it’s just that the vagueness gets vaguer. I want to say something, but there is snot running down my nose. I need to cough. I turn and face Marissa, running my hand under my nose.
“Alright. I’m ready.” Marissa and I half hike half slip back down the hill.
-
“So what’d you choose?” He’s settled down on the couch next to me, passing me a bowl full of smoothie topped with raw oats and honey. He places his own down on the table in front of us. He rests one hand on my calf, just for a moment. He leans forward quickly and grabs his glass to take a sip. I sit up and take a spoonful of smoothie.
“Still tastes like nothing.” I mumble with my mouthful.
“Like yours are much better.” He pulls his shoes off with his toes.
“Wanna start Outlander?” I place the bowl down and grab the remote.
“I have no clue what that is.”
“Me either.” I click start.