West Granton Road again, that long unglamorous artery of the city where nobody takes photographs and nobody writes poems because nobody expects anything worth remembering to happen there, and yet here I was walking it twice in one damned day, once in the bleary-blast sunlight of mid-afternoon when the wind came screaming off the Forth like an angry auntie, and once again in the ball-busting dark when the streetlamps buzzed like dying insects and the whole place felt like the afterthought of a forgotten city, the leftover scrap where the planners gave up and the dreamers never bothered showing up, and in both versions of the walk I felt like a man rehearsing two different versions of himself, the daylight me all jangly with too-little-sleep, the nightwalk me all muzzy with too-much-thinking, and in between the two: her, of course, always her.

     In the first walk the sun was too bright, the air too sharp, everything too loud—kids shouting near the scheme, football smacking off a wall, a tiny barking dog declaring war on the world, and the flats leaned crookedly against the sky like hungover giants, victorious only in being vertical at all—and I was thinking of the time I came here with a girl from Pilton who had constellation freckles and a smile that could peel paint, how we ducked behind the garages for a cigarette and ended up doing things that tasted like teenage catastrophe and cheap cider, and how she ghosted me after three weeks with a message that read only “don’t be weird,” and I didn’t know then and I barely know now what part of me was the weird bit, but I walked past those same garages and swear I saw her shadow shaped in the air like a photocopy of a memory I had revised too many times.

     There’s a man fixing a fence with a hammer that looked older than the fence, older than the street, older than both of us put together, and the clang-thud clang-thud clang-thud of it reminded me of some half-lost Joycean rhythm, a waking-dream thumptythunk that said life goes on, life goes on, even when it shouldn’t, even when it’s too heavy for the arms that must lift it, and the old man nodded at me like he knew the weight I was carrying, though he’d surely never seen me before, and still I returned the nod because there’s something holy in the way men who’d never met still recognised the same ache running through their ribs.

     And in the second walk—after the nothing-evening of scrolling my own boredom, after two bad whiskies, after a text from her that said “maybe tmrw?” in that way that meant both everything and nothing—I took the same street in the night-dark, and it’s a different beast entirely, the shadows longer, thicker, the pavement slick with unseen miseries, every streetlamp resounding its low electric dirge, and the foxes came out here too, bold as prophets, swaggering across the road with their sly grins and red fur flickering like matchflame, and I felt that stir within me, that night-mind murmur where the street started whispering its own nonsense sense at me: stonestep stairslip boyo beware now, the shadows know your sins.

     There’s a woman I sometimes see on this road at night, a thin girl with a huge rucksack full of things she’ll never need and one cigarette forever trembling between her fingers, and tonight she’s leaning against a bus stop panel like she’s bracing for an earthquake, and when I passed her she said “got a light?” in a voice that’s both wounded and weaponised, and I gave her mine and she inhaled like she’s drinking oxygen for the first time in a decade, and our eyes met just long enough for me to understand that she’s running from something, maybe someone, or maybe herself—aren’t we all—and she smiled this tiny half-lopsided smile like she’s thanking me for not asking questions I was too cowardly to voice anyway.

    The wind kicked up again, that Granton gale that felt like a punchline delivered by God with a bad sense of humour, and I pulled my jacket tighter as a bus roared by, empty except for the driver and the ghosts-of-shiftworkers-past rattling around inside, and my mind churned with word-slush, that dreamgum that stuck to the back of your tongue when you’re too tired to think in straight lines: girlglint, foxflick, nightnick, windwhip, heartslip, and the whole world felt like a looping reel of scenes not quite my own, and the street rose and fell like a tide pulling me somewhere I wasn’t brave enough to name.

     And by the time I reached the dead end where the street dissolved into that half-abandoned car park overlooking the water, I’m soaked in night and wind and the smell of my own doubtful perseverance, and the Forth glistened like a black tongue licking the horizon, and I thought of her again—the mattresswoman, the maybe-tomorrow woman—and wonder which version of me she’d get if tomorrow ever came, the sunlight me lugging old memories like a broken rucksack, or the night-me all stormwind nerves and beat babble, or some third creature the city hadn’t yet wrung out of me.

     And I stood there in the windcroon and nightglow, half-alive, half-lost, half-found, and I whispered something stupid into the dark—something like “keep going, lad”—and the waves lapped back in their ancient granite tongue, answering in their old slow code: aye, we’re trying too.