The Long Way Back To A Short Street

And it comes on me from behind, the way memory prefers to travel, not announced but insinuated, a smell first—damp wool and old stone and something faintly metallic, iron-on-rain, the after-scent of keys handled too often—and here’s Morningside’s evening easing its shoulders down, when the street tips slightly and becomes another street entirely, shorter, tighter, folded into the back of my skull where I keep the early maps, and my feet keep their present rhythm while something older stirs awake underneath.

I know this street even before I see it, know it in the calves, the throat, the small habitual tension that tightens when space narrows, and then it’s there, not sharply but as outline and pressure: the house with the close-set door, the stairwell that smelled of dust and boiled cabbage and coats that never quite dried, the way sound behaved there, the way footsteps magnified, the way voices travelled oddly, and I’m small again, shoulder-height to the banister, fingers sliding along chipped paint, counting steps because counting was a way of making movement feel chosen rather than imposed, oneandtwoandthreeandfour, breath tucked in time with the climb.

And there’s a parent somewhere in the background of it, not gone but not quite here either, a figure angled away, and the voice arrives from another room, attention divided and therefore unavailable, the kind of presence that teaches you early how to occupy space quietly, how to listen for shifts in tone, how to be ready to respond before being asked, and I feel again that low hum of vigilance settling into the body, the lesson that staying is provisional and leaving is a skill worth mastering, and the stairwell itself becomes instruction, a vertical tunnel of early rehearsal, teaching me how to move without drawing notice, how to leave a room without making a scene, how to hold myself slightly apart even when physically present, and I understand now how deeply that architecture wrote itself into me, how the short street trained my legs, how the close walls trained my lungs to breathe shallow, how the habit of early leaving was never about drama or defiance but about efficiency.

And the street I’m walking now—Morningside with its hedges and calm fronts and unhurried windows—contains that older street the way stone contains fossil, pressure preserving shape, and I see how easily I’ve mistaken this repetition for temperament, how I’ve dressed it up as restlessness, as romance, as the elegant refusal to settle, when really it’s been a long obedience to a small, early rule learned before language arrived to complicate it.

Faces surface then, never clearly, but as presences aligned along the same exit-path: the mattress warmth that never cooled into morning, the borrowed kitchens, the beds that learned my outline but not my name, the women I’ve left gently, politely, efficiently, telling myself stories about mutuality and timing and circumstance, all the while replaying a movement first practised on a narrow stair, and Sorcha isn’t in that memory, not directly, but she presses against it from the present like a thumb testing an old bruise, and I feel the pattern tense slightly at her nearness, in recognition, as if some younger version of me is tugging at my sleeve, saying careful now, this is where we usually go, this is where we know how to move.

And the realisation settles slowly, a sort of alignment: this was never primarily about women or rooms or romance or even leaving, but about formation, about a short street that taught me early how to keep one foot angled toward the door, how to survive by being ready, how to confuse readiness with freedom, and the memory loosens its grip the way it used to do, by retreating back into smell and texture and echo, and the present returns, Morningside resumes its composed face, but something has been refiled, a piece placed more accurately in the internal archive, and I keep walking, slower now, letting the past sit where it belongs, and the evening opens long ahead of me, longer than the street behind, and for the first time I don’t feel the need to count the steps.

THE SOUNDTRACK OF DALRY ROAD

Dalry Road is a book-length prose-poetry project set in Edinburgh, unfolding through long, rhythm-driven fragments that trace a city across night, memory, and movement. Neither novel nor traditional poetry collection, the book occupies a liminal space between narrative and lyric, where sentences stretch, loop, and accumulate like footsteps on wet stone.The text follows a wandering first-person voice moving through streets, bus stops, stairwells, and fleeting encounters in the hours before morning. Weather, light, and sound are not background but active forces: rain writes, streetlamps mutter, stone remembers. The city is experienced from within, not described from a distance, and language mirrors this intimacy through dense, breath-heavy phrasing and a jazz-like cadence influenced by writers such as James Joyce and Jack Kerouac.

Rather than telling a linear story, Dalry Road assembles an atmosphere. Past and present blur, faces recur in altered forms, and memory intrudes without warning. The fragments resist resolution, favouring repetition, drift, and sensation over explanation. What emerges is a portrait of urban consciousness at night—half-dreaming, half-alert—where walking becomes a way of thinking and listening.