Nestled between shopping lists and half-baked novel ideas in my phone’s notes app sits a list titled What haunts me about Glasgow?
The list goes:
My goddamn novel
[REDACTED]
[REDCATED]
[REDACTED]
[REDACTED] – update 17/03/2023 [REDACTED] does not haunt me anymore
Heterosexuality*
Improv (in a good way)
The pandemic
Losing my faith in Glasgow University
Aging

*in the context of not understanding my bisexuality until I was 24. I’m not just haunted by straight people as a concept.

The list was inspired by some light Instagram stalking of [REDACTED] (funnily enough, the one who no longer haunts me) and a caption she wrote about being haunted by this city after leaving. I wrote the list well over a year ago, possibly before even considering applying for a PhD in London. If I rewrote it now, the list would be longer and more specific.

In early March 2023, when I first considered leaving Glasgow, all I felt was relief. My world had shrunk in on itself for so many years. I forgot that it didn’t have to feel this oppressive. Now that I’m two months out from leaving, that relief is still there, but it is accompanied by an unexpected melancholia. Every friendship, every heartbreak, every life-defining memory I lived through in this city plays on a loop in my head. I have been stuck in the past this week, working through the ins and outs of emotional turbulence from several years ago, flip-flopping between feeling like I’ve been punched in the gut and asking myself why the hell I even care after so many years have passed.

I saw this tweet that said “one of the most helpful framings I’ve read on heartbreak (of any sort) is that we stay heartbroken for exactly as long as we stay afraid of stepping into what’s next”. And it occurred that me that that is why I’m currently hung up on things I got over in 2020. Because the same heartbreaks represent something different to me now. I got over the pain at the time, and went on to heal enough to get into my current relationship. When the pain comes up now, it’s because I’m scared to move on in a different way.

Now that I’m preparing to leave Glasgow, I’m aching over it again. Because the past few years have been “post-university”, everything has existed in the context of the years that came before. And now it’s the pre-PhD months. I’m about to step into a defining period of my life for the first time in years. And I’m afraid of how that changes the context of everything that came before. The further I get from those years, the more it stops being my identity. It’s no longer the “real” me that I’m trying to get back to. It’s just one version of me that existed for a few moments in time. And now I get to make new meaning in my life, and I don’t know what that means for the past.

A question I often ask myself is “what is the point?” (usually preceded by “literally” and followed by “of anything”). Whilst it might sound like a rallying cry (whisper) of depressives everywhere, I do believe the question has value if you take it beyond the realm of the rhetorical. I look at the seemingly unnecessary pain I have caused myself over the past couple of weeks by reading my old diaries, reliving the ghosts of heartbreaks past, and I ask myself: what is the point? Why am I doing this? What do I hope to gain from this?

The conclusions are a Choose Your Own Adventure game determined by your levels of cynicism, and I am a relentless optimist. Instead of concluding that reliving the highs and lows of my quasi-situationship of 2019 was emotional self-harm, dopamine-mining, and a colossal waste of my precious time, I found solace in the words of the great prophet of our era and decided that “looking backwards might be the only way to move forwards.” So backwards I looked. I felt the love and the pain and the paradigm-shifting heartbreak, I understood nuance that I had overlooked at the time, and I found something I hadn’t expected.

Amidst the diaries and non-fiction chronicles of that era, I found my attempts to retell the story in fiction. An old script I wrote for a master’s application (a little-known piece of Eliza lore is that in 2020 I was accepted onto a scriptwriting master’s programme at the Royal School of Speech and Drama, but I found this out literally an hour after getting accepted into a master’s at Glasgow. The week before the course started). I was struck by two things when I read the script: 1) the immediacy that comes from theatre, an emotional intimacy that feels entirely different to novels, and 2) the fact it was actually good. It wasn’t just a word-for-word retelling of my lived experiences, a snap-shot of a moment in time, it was creative and deliberate and dealt with themes of disability and mental health and complex interpersonal relationships. It showed me a side of my writing that I had forgotten existed, a creative urge for ingenuity and uniqueness. The limited staging notes and setting choices told a story in and of themselves. Not only did the play follow just two characters, it depicted their relationship only in the moments where they left a crowded room and found themselves alone in each other’s company, the sudden shift of persona brought on by comfort in each other’s presence. Where my diaries told this story in first person POV, my script told it as I had actually lived it, and that felt so much more profound.

Which brings be back to my list. A list that starts with “my goddamn novel” and my unfulfilled creative potential, and ends with “aging”, and the reality that things can never be as they were before. One reason I like to run my fingers over the scars on my heart from time to time is that I do believe the cure is in the wound. Time heals, but only if we let it. Otherwise it just leaves us numb and helpless, victims to the patterns we blindly repeat. Half the redacted names on my list are people I wish I had never met, and half are people I wish I had been a little better to. I wish I had been more secure within myself. I wish I had spent more time with my friends. I wish I had known when subtlety was a kinder gift than honesty. I wish I had the wisdom of a 26-year-old and the body of a 20-year-old. I wish for two timelines to coexist when they will always be separated by the wings of time, forever flying south for the inevitable winter. I wish I could flit back and forth between alternate universes, move forward with my life and make better on the promises of the past. I wish I could have been good back then, and I wish I was better now. I play out conversations in my head and imagine how differently my life would have gone if I had possessed the ability to be fucking normal when I was 20. I can explain away the context of my life back then, I can have compassion for myself as she floundered into adulthood. I understand why she was like that, and I really wish she hadn’t been.

But beyond the pain and the cringe that stood hand-in-hand at the forefront of my old diaries, was an abundance of love. I was so loved back then – I am still so loved now, but by fewer people. When I was a student, I had community, I had friends I saw almost every day. I was loved so intensely, in such a variety of ways. I will always be grateful for that, even the love that didn’t last. I lived viscerally and fully during those years, of course it hurts half a decade later.

I don’t know if I have aged out of my intensity – it feels like I have. Maybe in a decade I’ll write a list of “things that haunt me about London” and reflect on the “what ifs” of the upcoming period of my life. Who knows? There is the very real possibility that I have been in various states of depression since the pandemic, and that one day I will return to the passionate, vibrant (read: emotionally volatile and impulsive) self of my youth. Maybe I have simply outgrown her.

When I walk through Glasgow these days, I feel as though the veil between all my timelines is thin. I am 26 and I am 19 and all the ghosts are layered upon each other. I feel it—the life I once lived—everywhere around me. I walk through streets where my friends used to live, and a time machine propels me back to the late 2010s. I am dancing in the university quad with my best friend, drunk on mimosas. I am walking home at 3am (also drunk) after a friend’s leaving party before they went on a year abroad, softly singing to myself to ease the anxiety of walking alone at night. I am forever running up and down the stairs in the Queen Margaret Union, coming and going from improv workshops. The university campus has changed now, I can’t remember what half of it looked like back then. My appearance, too, has changed. I look at myself in the mirror and don’t see the girl I once was. My hair is finally its natural colour and I don’t wear quite so much purple anymore. My ghosts don’t haunt me so much as keep me company. I will miss them when I’m gone.

I have lived my life filled with an incurable nostalgia for the “good old days” that never really existed. I long for the future and I ache for the past, but ultimately my life has been defined by the brief moments where people saw through me. Where they looked into my mercurial green eyes and saw a hint of my soul. Where my pretences were pushed aside, and I was allowed to be real, a full, whole person instead of the mirage I never quite perfected. I have been my realest in this city, and spent the past four years watching it fade away. I didn’t become fake; I just became empty. And I treasure the good parts – my relationship, my writing, visits from friends. But there has been so much emptiness these past few years, and I let that trick me into thinking I had gotten over this place.

I’m two months out from leaving, and I am finally ready to admit to myself that I will miss Glasgow when I’m gone. Not the Glasgow I live in now—it feels as empty as I do—but the Glasgow of 5 years ago, the Glasgow where I found myself. Glasgow before my resentment darkened every building, as coaldust did in centuries past.