The Sunday Letter #17: Love Lessons
The Sunday Letter #17: Love Lessons
Last night I went out to the West Sands again. The sky was brilliantly clear after the ravages of Storm Babet and I could see the Milky Way—not as clearly as we saw it last weekend on Coll, but still it was there. The Big Dipper pulled me across the golf course and onto the sand and I looked up to the Dipper’s tail and found Polaris. Then I turned around to face the southern constellations and for the first time in my life I found Cassiopeia.
It’s not really as exciting as it sounds—Cassiopeia is a lopsided W, and anyone can find it if you know what you’re looking for—but it was exciting for me because I’d only ever been able to identify the Big Dipper up until that point.
As a child I was terrified of aliens and alien abductions (thanks so much, X-Files) and hated looking out at the night sky. It took decades for me to outgrow this fear. It disappeared so gradually that I don’t think I fully understood how big a thing it had been until I was out on the West Sands just a few weeks ago, surrounded by darkness and stars.
Look at you, I remember thinking. You’re out in the dark and you’re not thinking twice about it! Well done, Leduc!
After last weekend on Coll, and then again when I found Cassiopeia yesterday, I realized why. It’s the difference between cowering under the weight of something you don’t understand versus feeling like you’re held, among friends, even if you still don’t understand very much.
Today’s Sunday Letter will be a little shorter, friends. I’m still processing and ruminating and thinking over everything that happened last weekend. And now I’ve begun to tie all of that processing into the winding-down of this journey, this time in Scotland, and the inevitable winding-up of whatever’s next to come. This coming week I’m off to Inverness and then to Glasgow and Edinburgh and then, hopefully, to the Isle of Skye to round out the weekend. Fingers crossed for no more bad weather. I am taking the (giant? cosmic?) leap of leaving my laptop behind when I go. I’m hoping to take lots of pictures and spend some time walking along the trails in Inverness and maybe hear some music. I miss my little apartment—and the Byre Theatre, home to my favourite writing spot—already.
Today I went to St. Andrews Castle, which sits more or less across the street from Castle House, the English Department at the university. Jess and I had all of our classes in that building, and standing outside of it brought up all kinds of memories. (Including that time when I finished printing my thesis with literal minutes to spare and ran up the road and into the building with it still faintly warm in my hands.) I thought again about the 25-year-old Amanda and how different her year was in this town. She had so little money and didn’t do a lot of things. (Case in point: the castle as above.) She was also so worried about everything, all of the time, even when she tried not to show it. Worried about a career, about paying back her student loans, about finding love and a place in Scotland but also in the world. So much anxiety, all of the time.
The only thing I never worried about was life with Jess, because when we were together everything felt perfect. I felt like a superhero and saw her as the same. We were just so enamoured with each other, in a way that wasn’t romantic but also maybe was, a little. Which is to say: we were in love with each other but in a platonic way. Everything felt right and okay whenever she was around. We could spend hours in each other’s company without saying a word. (When I left Scotland for good at the end of 2010, I spent some time back in St. Andrews with Jess, who’d returned to the town by that point to do her PhD. One day we sat on opposite ends of the couch in her living room and did our own respective work—Jess on her thesis, me on my novel—for six hours without saying a word to each other. It was sublimely perfect. I still, all these years later, long for the perfection of that afternoon.)
But we were not together 100% of the time when we were both in St. Andrews in 2007-2008, and there is much about that time that still makes me shrink, a little. Little Amanda—so wildly hopeful, so wildly insecure.
When I was in Cardiff last month I went for lunch with my friends and we talked about the more difficult parts of our respective last decades.
“I don’t regret the decisions that I made,” I said then, in reference to some less-than-stellar choices I made in the middle of my thirties. “I just wish I’d loved myself a little more.”
Today as I walked along The Scores I realized that I hadn’t been speaking of my 25-year-old self when I said that. And what kind of sense does that make? I wish I’d loved my 30-35 year-old self a little more, but my 25-year-old self still makes me cringe. We can leave her floundering in the dust until she gets her act together.
As my time in Scotland draws to a close I’ve been wrestling with faint feelings of guilt—worry that I haven’t done enough, or that I haven’t been as outgoing or spontaneous or take-life-by-the-balls-ish as I should be, given all that’s transpired to place me over here. Have I perhaps spent too much quiet time in my apartment and my favourite writing spot at Byre Theatre, gone for too many solo walks, taken too many landscape photos that never have me in them? Maybe.
But do I regret any of it? No. I cannot love myself less for choosing to rest over and over again. What would Jess say to you if she was here? I ask myself, and the answer is always the same.
Live, live, live, she says. Live rested and well and understand that you are surrounded by friends even when you don’t understand who they are. A gradual shedding of your fears and anxieties is no less dramatic than shucking them all at once. You want a world where you can walk out into the darkness and recognize the sky, and if the path you take to get there is quiet and slow, what of it? Ten-year-old, twenty-five-year-old, forty-one-year-old you. They all deserve love. So give it.
So that’s what I’m off to do this week. To rest and be and soak up the wisdom of these Scottish stones and waves. And give more than a little love to myself—the twenty-five-year-old me, and now. As though this love, like the light from Cassiopeia coming to us from 11,000 light-years away, can move out through time and reach that younger Amanda and pull her forward to the future.
Currently Reading: the weather report. Rain, rain, stay away!
Currently Watching: Season Two of Only Murders In The Building.
Currently Eating: Cadbury Dairy Milk. Only two weeks to go until this stuff is only available to me via expensive British stores, sniff sniff.