{part 15}

{parts 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9,  10,  11, 12,  13 & 14}

so we jumped on the #10 bus for princes street, where we'd board a train and head to aberdeen to meet brodie, another of barclay's cousins. the rain was coming sporadically that day and the sky was a strange shade of brown-pink-orange that looked like the water you'd been using to dip your paintbrush in between watercolours.



we got to the station just in time--the next train for aberdeen left in ten minutes--and we found an empty car to sprawl out in.


i loved the trains. i loved the wide windows and the ridiculous views and the comfortable seats and the tables for playing games on and the way that we seemed to have them all to ourselves most of the time. i loved that when we didn't have them to ourselves, we met hilarious people with beautiful accents and fascinating stories.

the trip from edinburgh to aberdeen was a quick scoot up the east coast. it was so, so beautiful, but the pictures i shot weren't overly fantastic, due to the dark skies and wet windows. it's funny, though, how a crappy picture of something can bring you back to a place and time just enough that you don't really see the picture so much as the memory behind it. which means that these pictures are probably a million times more beautiful to me than they will ever be to anyone else.

because when i look at them i hear the music in my earphones and see barclay falling asleep in the seat across from me and feel the gentle rocking of the train and smell the rain, and remember that feeling of being so far away from anything familiar. the feeling that i was a helium balloon that had escaped my string, or a little paper boat floating down a river to the sea. i don't think i would like to feel that feeling every day forever, but sometimes i just need to feel it every day for a week or two.







i don't know what time it was when we arrived in aberdeen. brodie met us at the station and took us for lunch, and then we hopped a bus and went to the most amazing library i have ever seen in my life. i wanted to stay there and live in the elevators but barclay said no.






we walked around the rest of his university campus for a bit, and i felt like i was in another narnia book, waiting for some sort of half-human thing to emerge from a dark corner and send me on an adventure {to which, of course, i would have said yes}.




but, alas and alack, the night came to an end very quickly with no such luck. we hugged each other and said our goodbyes, and then barclay and i jumped on the train back to edinburgh.

{part 16>>>}