exhalation

I had a very purple day. Landscapes stretched lush and verdant before my feet and the minutes felt like seconds. At eight in the evening I was given a glass of fizzing blackcurrant juice on a terrace overlooking miles and kilometers of rucked-carpet hills the color of sound as the last glorious gulp of sunlight whipped against the hills, and that serves as a noble synecdoche for the last fourteen hours. Today wasn't perfect--I don't think there's been one of those yet, for me or for anybody--but it blended well and went down nicely.

Jesus and I did the same thing today: we woke up before everyone else and buggered off before they could notice. Sure, he did it two thousand years before I did, and sure, I didn't ascend to the kingdom of Heaven, but didn't I, though? I walked along a medieval castle wall in the early-morning sunlight, a silent Welsh city below me in red tile, and I wandered the battlements and watchtowers and flitted from arrow-slit to arrow-slit until I found a sign telling me to stop. A cigarette lighter, lying on the stones of a turret, near the front edge on a chess rook, for those of you following along at home. I tried it; it caught flame. This was where I would unwrap my Easter package.

Back in America, before I left. My mother gave me two small gift bags, the kind that hold cuff links or small chocolates. One red, one white with multicolored print balloons. The red one has a bag of chocolate chips, intended for a day when I felt especially low. Fortunately, I haven't felt low enough to turn to baking since my first night on Skye, when it was dark and I knew nobody. It was too late in the day to do anything but sleep that day, so the chips went unused. Now I'm usually happy, and I think the best time to use the chocolate chips will be when I see the Glasgow art students again, and that day will already be a happy one.

The other bag was stapled shut, and said "AWAIT FURTHER INSTRUCTIONS" in a Sharpie hand that gave no room for second guesses.

I stayed on Skye for two weeks, and when I left, the bags came with, near the bottom of my bag, just above the ridiculously heavy book and just below the not-enough clothes. When I stayed a night in Inverness, they stayed in the locker under my bed. They survived trips jammed into overhead train compartments and bus undercarriages. I resented the space they took up, but only a little bit. They were a nice anchor to home in a world that had become a boundless sea.

Today my mom told me to go somewhere beautiful and open my Easter package. I found the beautiful spot, and I opened my package, taking care not to rip too quickly and send a staple over the edge. This wasn't the Middle Ages, after all.

The package contained a small hand-decorated note, jelly beans, and dark chocolate that was worked into shapes of eggs and rabbits. The contents were lovely, but lovelier still was their arrangement. One of the plastic eggs that held the jelly beans had burst, and the bottom of the bag was pebbled with them, like a little terrarium in which the dominant plant was the jelly bean, or a pebble beach in a far realm of the Chocolate Factory. It was a perfect delight. Thank you, Mama!

I went back to the hostel, stopping once to sit on a bench in the sun and just sit. I made apple oatmeal in a kitchen that buzzed with parents and children (Easter hols, you know) and reminded me of the best parts of early-childhood trips. The oatmeal went down nicely with some hostel-stock brown sugar and a pitcher of water. Then ho for the druidic stone circles!

It was a ten-mile hike, all in all, and along the way I made friends with two Mancunians in their twenties, Chloe and Tashi. We chatted of that and this as we walked through the rucked-carpet hills, an open coast on one side and ewes and lambs all around us, like sentient soap bubbles that got lost. It doesn't matter what we talked about, just that we talked. Talking small is, I think, an underrated thing. I used to despise it, for the same reasons I disliked plotless books. Why talk (or by extension, write) if you had nothing to talk (or write) about?

That's something I think I figured out on this trip. It's good and important to talk about the big things, yes. But when you lift away such weighty burdens as relevance and social context, conversations can be delicate and beautiful ways to learn another person's mind without distraction. I've done a lot of talking for the sake of talking, now I better understand the books in which nothing really happens. What happens while nothing happens is just as important, in the mind of the right reader, as an epic quest with bows and harps and villages saved.

The rest of the day slipped by like a glass of lemonade; the shower and nap, the dinner out with my new friends, the walk along the quay with ice cream and bird jokes, the lift home and the promise to meet up in Birmingham, the blackcurrant juice, the blog writing. And now, here we are, aren't we?