My triumphant return to Edinburgh reduced me to a giddy five-year-old. The city had become part of the fabric of my dreams: otherworldly, symbolic, a mythological city of my own personal folklore. On my first foray into the wide-open world I settled on this place for no solid reason, and I built myself a life in this story-book setting, in the streets that seem to shift and change in their illogical woven arrangement.
I had little money, an odd assortment of things in a battered suitcase I’d picked up from the side of the road, and an acceptance letter from the University of Edinburgh. It had never before crossed my mind that it was within my reach to travel, for the world is so unimaginably distant when you know nothing but the unending expanse of Australia. But, with infinite cool, I persuaded myself that life abroad would be no different than life at home, and that since one could never be truly prepared it was best to just leap. I would simply study as I usually did, get a job as I always had, live simply and be open. Edinburgh marks the threshold: that attitude has come to define my life.
Returning to Edinburgh after five years was nothing short of a homecoming, and I hadn’t expected to be so taken with it after all that has happened in between—the cities I’ve fallen in love with, the lives I’ve built. But this first romance is deeply rooted in my being, fondly dwelt upon, sweetly revisited. Those gray drizzled bricks and those winding cobbled passages are like nowhere else. The sheer magic of the geography: dreary laneways that usher you onto the Cowgate; spiralling roads that suddenly bring you to the Grassmarket; wind-whipped streets that back onto the Meadows. It’s nigh impossible to visualise your route, but from any given location you know three portals that connect to three other pockets of the city, and thus you skip from corner to corner until you find yourself where you hoped to be, or somewhere unexpected and worthy of exploration.
Edinburgh taught me a boldness. It taught me to impose on others, to ask for the pleasure of their company, knowing they held back out of politeness. It taught me how far I could rely on myself, and to push yet further. It taught me that the world was within reach, and it taught me to be dissatisfied and to demand more. When I had made a comfortable enough nest in Edinburgh, I ventured out into Germany, the Czech Republic, Austria, Italy, the Netherlands. And I began to ask myself why I didn’t impose greater challenges on myself, why I didn’t know any other languages, why Australia seemed inevitable when my grandparents themselves had shipped their lives across the world. Perhaps we belonged wherever we felt we did.
A past self, Edinburgh
Coming back felt like time-travel—like meeting my past self face to face, that often-solitary self who was first unleashed on the world, who quietly and unassumingly found her place like water trickling in between the cobblestones, before rushing on yet further, moving ever fluidly through the world. So many in my life don’t know this me, can’t see how profoundly I was moulded by this ancient place that has cocooned countless others before. But some know the bewitching ways of Auld Reekie—Anna concurs: ‘I always have a sense of happy contentment whenever I get off the train at Waverley.’ Either this unbelievable city is real, or I woke up in my dreams.
