By August Edna
I sat in my room, one of thousands in the student-allocated premises near to the university. It was cold outside, pre-Christmas, diagonals of sleet propelled onto my floor. I had left the window open, lying on my bed with just my boxers on. My nipples pointed up into the empty room, tiny things pointed at the bare ceiling. I was on one of the highest floors of the building, set towards the edge of town, its classical flare. I had been going between a book— How to Raise Your Own Salary, a lesser-known work of Hill’s— scrolling Instagram, Reddit, various other, grabbing platforms. This was the poor escape from the sludge of my brain, self-quizzing its own despair, contemplative questions. It wasn’t working anyhow. I felt as bad as I did earlier that morning, when I’d walked the city by myself in the early hours.
The Royal Mile sat like the road towards death while I walked it. The cobbled route to the coast just beyond Leith seemed like forever away, thrashes of dark sediment, grey water, spit. The dismal unendingness swung into fruition like a knuckled punch to the mouth. Walking I acknowledged the further miseries. A homeless man slept on the streetside. Two drunk teenagers staggered home to wherever home was. I continued down the straight length of the street. I passed historical statues frozen in time and pose, stone lessons beyond my cognitive reach, my declining comprehensions. They watched me, sets of rock-hard eyeballs and centuries-old stares, while I walked past paying little attention to their faded legacies. I wandered, and the birds sat plump on rails and bollards like weather-deteriorated retirees waiting for the bus with stubborn stances. Their indifference to the world’s condition— to their own condition also— made them seem pointless sitting there, feathered and immobile, universal relics. Though this clan of Edinburgh bird had the required agility but chose not to use it. They stared at me walking past them sat on the ahead bollards. Slumber landed itself as answer to the sum of their creation and being. Then I thought they probably thought similar of me, looking tiresome and scuffed, head down, arms untrying.
I got to the seafront, sitting down. Swash rolled in at an exaggerated pace, hitting the shore in spread layers. The sea was a cache of information, thick with tides of observatory revelation. In my current case I gained nothing from it, however.
Instead, I wondered where he was, what he was doing, the place he’d scarpered to. He’d told me he was leaving the country for good, since his job allowed him to work in remote settings. Before this I had believed he would stay with me– I’d been silly and insecure enough to actually believe this. I believed he wanted a steady continuation of us, our secret togetherness. I should have known a married man was the writing person to be with. To have him as the first person I ever slept with was a regretful step even further. But I’d never been good at thinking things through. It had been in a hotel, the room he always booked for us from that afternoon onward. He told me without shame that he’s used it few times with different prostitutes, or sex worker’s, I amended for him.
In the time we were together I liked to study him. He’d built his life as a jumbled configuring of misidentification, a life of partials and maybe’s, perhaps at some point’s. The hotel suite overlooked town’s greyish end, rain spattering onto the peripheries of Monday afternoon’s dull attire. The same order of hooking up lasted for four months, right into early March, which was now where I sat on this beach alone, and he was God knows where with God knows whom. In my heartbreak I’d been reading Fitzgerald; I’d read somewhere that Gatsby was a memoir of the writer’s own romantic hurt. In my case it hurt deep to fall in love with a soul already engaged to deceitful functioning. Perhaps his job title of investment analyst I’d undermined— he’d extended his expertise and province to being an analyst of the irrational condition: the way we lie and cheat, flounder and inflict distress. He was able to analyse himself, seemingly, to take himself to a place of disguised soul-complexity that had a habit for hurtful decisions. Even then, I imagined he sometimes felt conflicted, a slither of humanness creeping up on his cold-hearted calculations, excuses. Or perhaps men like him didn’t have excuses for anything or anyone, including myself.
Five years later I came to the end of the street, just off the Mile, when I saw him for the first time since he’d broken things off. He stood out amongst the commuters, a singleton in the webbed crowd. Even in my lustful bias I felt this was justified. They looked tired and still half-asleep amongst the morning commute, while he seemed in a mode of formal bubbliness, swinging his briefcase at his side like it were a leather pet for a trusting companion. With most of the city figures I met, I was greeted with stern faces, jagged, practised countenances of minimal laughter and little tales. They were machine-people, prodigies of compliance and formula, in agreement with the sentiment of seriousness, the unendingness of each pencil office building they had their years go by in. He’d never been like them. He was riveting, a street-to-street surprise, quirkily handsome and discerning. As he came round the corner towards me, he was tucked into the back of the walking crowd that’d come off the train from the nearby station. Earphones in, shirt dragged down into the grip of his belt. I was looking at the ghost of time that’d gouged me into therapy rooms and a pattern of further hurtful hook-ups; yet here he walked in work-ready bliss, none the wiser.
I didn’t know what to say or do or think. Without knowing it I suddenly found myself on the other side of the street where he was. I then interjected myself into the crowd’s middle, making my way to its rear. Soon I was facing him and was to close for him not to notice me blocking his path. I was like a dead person shot against a wall, held upright in death by accidental apparatus. It felt like I’d been dead years already, until he, the routine marksman of wounds to the heart, now made his fatal reappearance.
“You’re here. I didn’t know that you were still here.”
It was the first thing I could think to say to him. He took out his earphone, twiddling it in his hand. He looked neither pleased nor angered to see me. I had no idea how I looked or felt about seeing him.
“Pardon me,” he said, raising an eyebrow.
“I said, I didn’t know you were here.”
I thought about the many-years of longing, linking the coordinates of our history on coke plummets post nights-out and early morning bus routes back to bed. No matter how I tried to forget, I could never escape the brief togetherness we’d shared on those weekly occasions on that top-floor hotel room, the scent of half-drank wine, each inch of erected light coming up from the city below.
“Sorry. Who are you?” He mustered a confused face in my direction. “There must be a mistake here.”
“There’s not a mistake. You know who I am.”
“I really think there’s been a mistake. I don’t recognize you, honestly.”
He spoke with strange command, his words withered to a finality that once would have scared me, tangling my usual defensiveness so that he’d make it stuck. But now I was not scared. We stood facing each other with the moving crowd around us. Men like him seemed to belong to anything but a crowd, the moving procession of blended identity, clustered shapes of flesh in transition. They stood out not by a matter of difference, but because they learned how to adjust to the crowd, how to sift themselves out of the human as a collective. Men like him seemed to represent their existence in their strive to always make themselves unattached; to live adjacent to the hum-dum of conscience and kindness was to childishly reject acceptance of one’s capabilities to express such.
I tried to gauge how to respond to him. How was I to respond to his casual defence, to his obviousness in my natural pose as his once former lover.
“You do know me,” I said adamantly.
“I don’t. I’ve got to get to work, so if you’ll please excuse me—”
“Adam, please. Don’t do this.”
He shuffled past me. It was as if by saying his name I’d touched him inappropriately. He stepped back and then away. “You must have got the wrong person. Now leave me alone.”
“I can find you on LinkedIn,” I called after him in vain.
But he was already gone, back with the train-crowd. I wondered if he was still with his wife, if they’d had the child she wanted— that he’d always been hesitant about. He was already out of sight before I could decide.