Clingy

Outrunning attachment in Glasgow

St. Jerome and St. Catherine of Alexandria

My boyfriend wanted space. I wasn’t familiar with the concept. “I need to know you can give me space,” he said over the phone.

“How much space?” I said. “Like, how long are we talking?”

“That’s the type of question that worries me.”

I couldn’t tell who was asking too much of the other. I just wanted to see my boyfriend a regular amount of times per week.

“I’ll call you in a couple days,” he said.

I had already lost the battle. “Sounds good,” I said in a friendly voice.

I hung up first just to reclaim some power. Then I worried I had hung up too soon. Maybe he had been about to say more, to change his mind. I thought about the meaning of a couple, a phrase that had always confused me. Some people used it to mean exactly two, some to mean a few, several, up to five. I doubted my boyfriend would go dark for five days. It was Monday now. I would have to wait until Wednesday at the very minimum. I could wait until Wednesday.

I woke up in the middle of the night feeling that I could not wait until Wednesday. I was in danger of doing something rash, like writing an impassioned letter, or showing up at his house, or both: showing up at his house to deliver an impassioned letter in person. I opened my laptop and booked a train from London to Glasgow.

In the morning, I went to the train station. I wasn’t supposed to contact my boyfriend anymore, which meant I could do whatever I wanted and he couldn’t be mad I hadn’t told him. The train to Glasgow took four hours. I switched off my phone and tried to read a book. I looked out the window and was unimpressed. Just grass and stuff.

In Glasgow, I immediately became lost. I had drawn a map of the city center in my notebook, labeling all the streets and highlighting the route from station to Travelodge, but the written streets didn’t match the real streets, and the weather was not nice enough for this to be funny.

Canny Glasgow, John Atkinson Grimshaw

It was late when I arrived. I rode the elevator up with a grim-looking family. All of us, small children included, seemed to understand that the Travelodge was a punishment.

I got off at the twelfth floor and unlocked my room. Every Travelodge in the world smells the same: an ashtray rinsed quickly, without soap. I recognized the striped curtains from the Walthamstow Travelodge, and from Peterborough, and Crewe. Same tiny plastic kettle, same powdered coffee. Same city: the gray one, the only one.

I was hungry for dinner. I left the building and walked in an arbitrary direction. I hadn’t chosen a restaurant in advance, wanting to be spontaneous. At a pub a few blocks away, I ordered a meat pie, which struck me as regional. The room was very large. The space was growing. I could feel it.

I slept badly on an overstuffed pillow. In the morning, I boiled water in the tiny kettle and double-bagged my tea for an extra boost. I thought about texting my boyfriend, Guess where I am. But he would guess I was somewhere even crazier than Glasgow, like on his balcony or a highway overpass. I wasn’t crazy. I was just very, very attentive.

---

My new hand-drawn map was more detailed than the last, more elaborate, spanning many pages, with a legend and a few close-ups of “cool” neighborhoods speckled with red dots for destinations: bookshops, museums, cafes, parks. The goal was to keep moving through space, to learn to want it. I left my phone at home.

The map led me westward. The sky was white, the wind unfriendly, the streets empty except for the occasional passing car. Too late, I discovered two major cartographical oversights: first, that I had not indicated scale, and second, that I had not distinguished between grass and water. So I might’ve been minutes or miles from the park, and the park might’ve been a pond.

I found myself in a green space with water running through it. I consulted my map. This did not feel like a city. This felt like space, and it was awful. The temperature dropped, the sky darkened, and I followed the bleak banks of a river toward a new world.

Hours passed. To keep the panic at bay, I imagined that my mind was a blank document, my thoughts a sequence of sentences descending down the page. It was easier to reckon with reality in writing, and easier to write in my head. I liked writing in my head. I was “working on a novel” but too afraid to open the file. I kept asking my boyfriend to read a chapter. He was very busy.

He was bound to be less busy now, with all the space I’d given him. I needed my own way to be busy. I felt suddenly inspired. If I made it back to the Travelodge, I would finish my novel. I didn’t need travel, I realized. Glasgow was just a substitute for imagination.

---

I was shaking with cold and hunger when I found the kebab shop. A plate of brown meat revived me. A bus delivered me home. I was saved. I lay in my bed and did not write my novel.

The next day, I did not write my novel.

The day after that, I did not write my novel.

It was possible to die like this.

Still Life with a Skull and a Writing Quill, Pieter Claesz

Then it was my final day in Glasgow. I enjoyed a trademark Travelodge shower—intermittently scalding. I packed my bag. I had a few hours left before my train. I opened my laptop and did not write my novel.

I went online and found a picture that reminded me of my novel. I brought the picture to a tattoo parlor and got it inked on my forearm. It would tell me to write. One day, it would serve as a symbol of my achievement, or my failure. It was up to me to decide which.

Bleeding a little, smug with the preemptive satisfaction of a first draft, I walked to the train station. My forearm was wrapped in cling film and concealed beneath my sleeve like a shipment of drugs. My boyfriend called.

“I’m in Glasgow,” I said, unable to contain myself. Everything seemed possible now, even the idea that he might love me.