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Dear London

I have been mulling over whether we should keep on seeing each other or go our separate ways. I’ve just under a month to decide. I’d like to say ‘It’s just me’ but I think it’s you - I think it’s always been you. I think I hate you, and I love you and I hate myself for it.

The truth is I’m scared of you. And that why I’ve always been drawn to you. Am I a masochist? I have become used to being the submissive one. Are all of us Scots this way? Although I do protest, I think I admire your ruthlessness. My friends tell me this is sick, they want me to leave but I look at the power you wield and it makes me quiver. I have become dangerously dependent.

I think you’re too volatile, maybe insane. How do you contain so many desires within yourself? One day you love sushi and opera and Trash metal and dog racing. The next its stocks and shares and hookers and Bhangra and bicycles and war. You’re insane with insatiable possibilities. I don’t think you even notice what you have done. Do you even scare yourself?

I need structure in my life, the gridiron street structure of Glasgow, the austerity of sky and sea, the regulated customs of our many Scottish guilts. I need less choice, less excitement. I need to walk through silent glens, scarred with the memories of glaciers. I need to be alone.

You are all noise, living in the now. You have bedded so many people from so many lands. I was only one. You entice most of us to our ruin, but still we keep coming. The power of your desire is infectious. You’ve consumed every excess under the sun. The energy you expend in one hour could power me for a year. You throw money around like there is no tomorrow. And maybe there isn’t. You’re like an end of world party every night and every morning you wander in hungover amnesia. The doctor tells me I have caught an unknown disease from our contact.

You tell me you are the way the world will be, you tell me you are the future. But staying with you might kill me. I am trying to find within me, the power to leave you.

If we split, if I retreat to heal my wounds, will you curse my name and cast me into your pit of forgetting? Or is there some part of you that needs me? Will you crave my silence, my melancholy? Maybe you will only miss me when I am gone. Or have you forgotten me already?

Love

Ewan Morrison, Scotland

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