Emily Wilkinson Consider this piece of writing as flash fiction or a prose poem, the choice is yours. The walks that inspired this piece took place in and around the community of Ullapool, where I lived for six months after leaving London. Spending time in these unique landscapes was a healing and reorientation, a total immersion within small communities woven into the land.
Fingers search for keys in woollen coat pockets as a nearby rustle sends my heart racing. Footsteps quicken out of habit as I hurry from glittering village glow into a charcoal night. The conditioned body-mind wants to bolt like a frightened rabbit, until my nervous system realises it was probably just an animal. Deep breaths. Slow down. You are alone. Truly alone, walking myself home without the nearness of other human bodies. Never in twelve years of city-dwelling would I have walked where there were no streetlights. I believed darkness was something that happened to you, not something you could inhabit. But here I am, heading towards the outskirts of a small community stitched into Scotland’s Northwest coast.
Owls screech whilst distant boats rattle. A just-visible horizon guides, as ebony land descends beneath meandering ridges. On moonless nights, I must choose: navigate with a head torch or trust what I can barely see. One’s eyes really do adjust, as does a mind wandering far from urban paranoia. Shoulders expand to meet the night. My nocturnal body morphs with the inky hour, bleeding outside familiar territory. Sometimes I turn off onto the footpath, just to witness heather silhouettes tracing land towards sea. To witness the shape of things when no one else is looking. The night has entered me. I have become the night. Together, we turn homeward, drawing out delicious moments before daytime returns with its demands, definitions, masks. The night remains insistent that I am only myself.