The Feel of Travel

I hadn't been walking for long when the car struck me at a roundabout in Holyrood Park. The sound was that of bone on metal. Then screeching tires and the blackest black you could ever imagine. The driver, a middle-aged woman with vein-swollen fingers, moaned into her cupped hand, leaning on the side of her car. Shaking uncontrollably. The world was muted, paler when I propped myself up on my elbows, like I was staring at the past in one of my parent’s faded Polaroids.
“Yeah, well, that’s on me. My bad,” I said with a dismissive chuckle. I sucked my thumb and stuck it to the cut on my forehead, trying to dam the thick trickle of blood into my left eye.
Will ye lit me tak' ye somewhaur? please? She said it two, four, seven times. Stuttering, stuck on repeat. I said no only once, performed the walk-a-straight-line-and-alternate-pointing-at-your-nose-with-each-arm test and she got it. Understood that there really was no injury pressing enough to take me somewhere. A twenty pound bill was all she had—I don’t want it. I walked out in front of you. It was my fault—but she was gone.

These are the things that happen when you set out to discover your heritage alone, when you decide to hike from the center of Edinburgh, Scotland—through streets that you don’t really know how to navigate—in hopes of reaching and conquering the local dormant volcano: King Arthur’s Seat.

It took almost an hour; all the time this crunching in the area between my neck and back, like someone was crushing a bag of Cheetos against my skin. Occasionally a half-fall—exhaustion and shoes with no traction in the steep muddy ruts taking me down hard. But that sight, once I reached the top. Like a picture, but real. Stretching for as far as I could see like I was the point from which it was spreading out.
Ye want me tae a tak' a picture ay ye in front ay it? She was a pretty young woman with long red hair and big almond-shaped green eyes. I told her no. I could’ve gotten a picture right there, superimposed in front of the most beautiful view I had ever seen in real life. But I would never belong in that picture. Yes, my homeland. Yes, my father’s land. Yes. Yes. Yes. But it would've cheapened it; I didn't need to be in the frame to remind me I had been there. Hadn't I always been there in one sense? Besides, the scar on my forehead would be reminder enough.