So the url of this blog is "Lord Byron's Luggage." This used to be the blog title, as well, and back then, it was ever so appropriate for my purposes. I was chronicling my adventures in a fairytale city that tasted like meringue and melted on my tongue with that same sticky sweetness, the lightness, the airy, can't-get-enough-ness of Edinburgh.
Anyway, the title/URL combo came from a Warren Zevon song, called "Lord Byron's Luggage." I liked the opening line:
Lord Byron had a lot of luggage; he took it when he traveled far and wide.I don't have a lot of physical luggage. I travel light enough that, when I arrived at the airport in Edinburgh at about 6 AM, having just undergone the undocumented flight from hell, the woman sent to greet the exchange students was shocked. A backpack and what Homeless Dan calls my "tiny suitcase." It did not occur to me that, for six months of living in a new country, I might need more than six shirts. (It didn't occur to me because, after all, I did not. Seriously. Look at the photos. I am constantly wearing the same six shirts layered in different ways. In every single photo.)
But just the same, I had some luggage. I was traveling to a new country, escaping some really awful failed friendships, one romantic misstep that seemed, at the time, particularly brutal, and a grandfather who was about to die. Let's not sugarcoat that, because it happened. He died three or four days after I got to the city.
So I spent six months living in a fairy tale. Falling in love with strangers who would get to stay as perfect as James Dean, wandering around giant gardens, drinking for the first time in my life, hanging out with Robert and Susannah and Mhairi and Jason and Cara and Kevin, and Amandine, and ohgod, that Benedict. I miss Will almost all the time, and Beth, too. I wrote more while I was in Scotland than I have at any other point in my life. I also played more Snood and had more insomniac meanders through the really sketchy parts of town than I ever hope to again. As I told Ben one night, when I ran into him with his roommate at 3 AM on Prince's Street, "My legs, they just won't settle."
(For those of you who wonder where my confusion with Ben lay, I met his roommate and her response was, "OH! ASHLEY! It's so fantastic to finally meet you!")
But as I came home from Scotland, my blog became more about appreciating that, then I stopped writing. Then I started writing again. But it was a mishmash of things. Quotes from Alice Hoffman, pictures of dresses and Scottish islands. Esoteric bull about scattering my grandfather's ashes. Then I moved to DC and didn't write for the four months I was there. And why would I? That was an awful experience, and I had no time to sleep, let alone write about the grind of being Alicia's little wife. Then I met Homeless Dan, and I moved home, and I wrote about movies for awhile. Then I did not write for a long time, during which my life has been utter turmoil and upsets and plot twists and "When did that happen? And how old am I again?" This was the "Typing Gibberish" period.
And now, here I sit, at yet another crossroads, and I'm thinking about all that luggage. All that nostalgia and the things I keep just for me, those things that don't fit in my tiny suitcase, and that don't even really fit in my life anywhere, anymore, and I keep thinking, how am I holding onto these things and why can I not let go for the life of me? My jaw hurts from holding so tight. (I mean that literally. I often cannot unclench my jaw.) My knuckles can turn white and my knees can collapse, and my entire world can shrink so that nothing will fit, but I keep carrying these things, finding space for them, making space for them.
I love the things that are just mine, but I'm not sure how to keep them without missing out on forward momentum.
