She remembers him by the way his handwriting leaned forward even when the words said nothing important, by the way the postcards arrived from places that sounded invented when spoken aloud, Kirkwall, Lund, a dock in Stavanger where the sky kept pressing down on the roofs as if it wanted to be part of the city, and she remembers how he used to sit on the low wall near the skate park by Portobello Beach with a cheap coffee cooling between his knees and talk about leaving as if it were a physical object you could pick up, as if departure had a weight and a texture and could be packed into a rucksack along with socks and a battered notebook and the stubborn hope that somewhere else would be softer on the skin.

    He was called Callum when he stood next to her on the wind-gnawed pavement, Callum when he laughed and spat into the gutter and said he would be gone by winter, and she called him Callum only in her head because aloud she called him nothing, because names felt like little hooks and she did not want to hook him to her life when he was already learning the language of loosening, of unfastening himself from rooms and routines and the slow, predictable ache of staying.

     The first postcard came from a ferry crossing, a smear of blue water and the suggestion of a harbour behind it, and on the back he had written only, Still here, still breathing, which she read as a promise even though it was not meant to be one, and she held the card in her hands in the stairwell of the flat in Gorgie where the paint peeled like old scabs from the walls and the radiator clicked and knocked its small mechanical prayers into the night, and she thought of him leaning into wind, of him learning new streets that did not know her shadow, and something in her chest loosened and tightened at the same time, a double-knot feeling, relief braided with envy, because he had done the thing she only rehearsed in her head.

     There were more cards after that, Bergen with rain stitched into the photograph, Rotterdam with a slice of neon reflected in canal-dark water, a nameless town where the buildings looked like they were leaning away from each other in private disagreement, and each time she pinned the card above her mattress with a thumbtack that left a small bright wound in the wall, and each time she told herself that this was what survival could look like, that sometimes not staying was not abandonment but oxygen, that sometimes you leave not because you are cruel but because the room you are in has started to shrink around your lungs.

    She never wrote back, not because she did not have words but because the words she had felt like weights, like small anchors she would be dropping into the pockets of his coat, and she wanted him light, wanted him unburdened by her quiet inventory of hurt, by the way her life kept folding back into the same shapes no matter how carefully she tried to iron it flat, and so she kept the postcards as proof that escape was not a myth, that someone she knew had found the door and walked through it without being struck by lightning or dragged back by the ankle.

     On certain nights she would lie on the floor of her room and stare at the underside of the bed, at the dustwebs and lost coins and the faint smell of old wood and damp, and she would whisper the names of the places he had gone as if they were spells, Kirkwall, Bergen, Rotterdam, and she would imagine the sound of trains leaving Waverley Station without her, imagine the small violence of departure, the clean cut of it, and she would wonder whether leaving was a kind of courage or just another way of refusing to stay long enough to be seen breaking, and sometimes, when the wind worried the window and the city made its low animal noises beyond the glass, she would let herself believe that distance was not only loss but a shape of care, that by not following him she had learned something about the way people carry their own exits inside them, that the first proof of survival is not staying alive in the same place but learning that you are allowed to go, even if you do not yet know how.