In the newness you want to be scrubbed clean and unsullied, freshly born from the earth just yesterday. But it’s impossible not to carry your former selves on your back, behind your earlobes, in the gap between your ribs. I’ve been trying to find the edges of mine recently, unspooling the thread through my old lives in the way I would walk through the rooms of my childhood home if I could, tracing the patterned wool carpet under my fingers and looking for scraps of my existence, a record left behind.
That house had a habit of holding onto things. We used to find Victorian pennies stuck in the gaps between the floorboards in the attic, and once discovered a tiny china doll in the cupboard under the back stairs, naked save for a nest of curls on her head that appeared to be made from real human hair. There was lore, too; a story of the former owner’s son jumping out the window upstairs and breaking his leg as his mother screamed in the bedroom next door, giving birth to his baby sister. The crack in the stained glass door, the poisoned tree. The occasional ghost.
Two years ago, in wintertime, I went back to the village and made another solo pilgrimage to the house. Paint was flaking off the gates and the tree-lined driveway was full of deep potholes, stagnant puddles of muck and rainwater. Even from the edge of the clearing I could see the house looked abandoned, the once lush lawn long overgrown. A broken slide was half-hidden under the big tree by the wall and a rusty car with no wheels parked nearby. It felt dangerous. It felt like the aftermath of something.
I crept around the back, feeling my way along the damp stone walls as though it was too dark to see. A row of bars still covered the kitchen window and as I peered through the glass I saw they’d never changed the wallpaper, even nearly two decades later. I wondered if they’d ever found the key to the cupboard in my room, an old Edinburgh press like they had in all the bedrooms of the house. I’d locked it and thrown the key out the window into the bushes in a last act of protest before we left. My mother thinks I left a curse on the house in the process. I wouldn’t be surprised if I had.
One day I will go to all the places I’ve ever been moulded with someone I love, as if to convince myself they’d been there beside me all along. Here, this tiny kirk on a lonely island. Here, these sun soaked steps. Will you know me, now? Can you see me, now? It’s not quite nostalgia, but something else; a feeling of leaving fragments of yourself in places and trying to go back and piece them all together. Trying to break old patterns, trying to not make the same mistakes.
In the meantime I unfurl in images, sending snapshots of stormy fields and beaches and books and scraps from old diaries I keep hidden in a suitcase under the bed. Two weeks ago we drove through the streets near where he grew up and his voice was a low murmur over the radio as he spoke about being a kid here, and my hand was on the back of his neck and my eyes were closed but nothing was dark and everything was golden. I gathered his words in my mind and tried to imagine him as he was in his other lives, trying to see him and know him.