The woods are full of wardens

I was never a religious girl. My mother advocated that her children would be told to believe whatever they wanted to believe in. That God existed if I said he existed. My dad kept his mouth shut, never one to push what he thought on anyone else unless it involved a man with a guitar. I learnt on his knee more chords than I can remember. I sat by the window wedged open by a red box full of business cards that I was invariably drawn to because of the colour. If I shut my eyes all I can see is green and that was the garden. This was my dad's first office in my first house I have a memory of. I learnt rock progressions, influences, diverging strands, genres. My early childhood is this kind of haze of trees and my face squashed against car windows and mountains and the sea. My very first memory was with my gran, strangely not from the set of grandparents I was closest to, and we went on a walk round where she lived that's full of these towering fir trees that plastered the ground in needles and smelt unbelievably wonderful. My memory is of cherry tomatoes bursting in my mouth and of red squirrels hiding up in the trees above me.

None of that was what I wanted to say.

I head into uni earlier than I need and come home later than I should. This is because I wander. I can't tell you where anything is in the West End. I can't tell you where you can get a cheap drink and a good seat. I can tell you walls and trees and bumps in the road, benches and bridges and ducks and the foreign section of Fopp and the little back street with BOOKS ---> on the wall and the new bookshop that's opening on Byres Road tomorrow. I can tell you stories about the BBC if we head down that way and how the price of bagels has increased since last year and how we used to loudly shout equations when we cut through the Maths building to get to English Lit. I could tell you stolen coffees during tests and stolen kisses during films. The mildest cases of stalking to kill the time before a class. I set out everyday in the hope of getting lost but my father gave me a sense of direction along with my dark hair, short stature and a cynical slant even he thinks is getting worse. I didn't care about university which is why I didn't apply when I already had the grades in 5th year. I applied when everyone else applied in a sort of 'that will do' manner. I went to one open day after I had been accepted because I'd already fallen in love with the place. I didn't even know where the other universities were exactly and I didn't care. See every day I can wake up and I am me, stuck in my head with everybody else's problems. But I stick a book in my bag and I get away. Cheaper than the plane to Paris or New York or Frisco or Barcelona or St Petersburg. Cheaper than the boat to Dublin or the train to London or Edinburgh or the car ride up to family I don't know on a island. It's easy to lose myself there because there are so many languages shouted over my head it makes me dizzy. In winter in the Hetherington building I could sit and watch a boy and girl frown over their own Cyrillic alphabet. For a few hours in the day none of you matter.

I'm not a religious girl but I took a walk through the park with the sun shining cold Autumn blues and I stumbled into a jam session half-hidden in a bush with a double bass and make shift drums. The preacher girl with long hair tied around her head shuffled along on the bench to make room for me and none of us said a thing. We erased ourselves in an afternoon and it didn't matter that I was floundering. My motto since I grew up was to keep in mind that nothing really matters. But don't look at that negatively because it isn't meant negatively. It's when you hold yourself quiet and just look and think and feel and listen and I mean really listen, you might realise that nothing is certain and nothing is true and nothing is right except that you are in that moment of time. You are this mess of colour on a rushing background, this pulsing breath of stale air recycling the thoughts of everybody. I am everybody who ever thought reincarnated and I am nobody and one day I will stop messing around in the shadows and stay outside my cave.

Every book is my bible and every song my hymn but I'm preaching to myself past and future while my present sits mooning with her face to the sky wishing she never had to come down.