You can travel so much over the course of a year. Throughout that time you can become stronger, more carefree, or even more intuitive. You can see things in new ways, and you can experience places without the emotions that once carried you to them.
As I crossed that border it was as though a switch had been turned off. All that I had imagined myself to feel had been erased, a blank page opened and there it has since sat waiting to be written upon. I don’t have those stories yet but they are there and we’ll share them soon.
I knew that returning here would be a strange feeling. Last year it was all so fraught. Tears fell, boundaries were crossed, everything was shared online. This time things were different, calmer and more in the moment. Since we’ve been here, we’ve very much been ‘with the flow’, living each day and its events as they’ve unfolded. We’ve not done a huge itinerary of activities, or social media posts. This time, it has been more about switching off from a world that so often requires us to be switched on and present for everything.
I imagined that returning to this very place, that has so often been the focus of my writing, my dreams, and at times my nightmares, would be difficult or overwhelming. But it hasn’t been that. If anything it has been closure. Closure on chapters that had run into a state of disarray. I think that's something that our minds tend to do when we feel so strongly about the places where we’ve been. But I also think that’s the point. Those places are important and significant to us personally. They're what has led us to today, and those same places can be very different when we revisit them. Because as time has passed, things have moved on, people who were once there are no longer around, and new names have appeared in their place. Things change and so do we.
I’d imagined myself coming back here to pick up all of the same conversations, experiences and emotional markers that I’d left behind last year, but I didn’t find them this time. Instead, we both found ourselves in a calmer place, and for those who read 'Long night on the loch', I'm pleased to say that there has not been a sequel to that story. And so, as we now prepare to take another long road trip through the night, the route may be the same but the stories we’ll bring home will be very different.
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