The Outrun

by Amy Liptrot

Here I have been mixing with people of all ages and backgrounds – we have to – whereas in London I was in a bubble. I went to the city to meet new people, to expand my ideas and social circles, but ended up meeting people more and more like myself. We curated our experiences into ever narrower subsections until we were unlikely to encounter anything that made us uncomfortable.

I think about how the moon is getting further away from the Earth and although this is only happening at about 3.78 centimetres per year, or the same speed at which our fingernails grow, it seems terribly sad.

I’m using technology to take myself to the centre of something from my spot at the edge of the ocean. I’m trying to make sense of my environment. With my digital devices, the planes and birds and stars seem more quantifiable and trackable. I’m trying to make a connection with the world outside Papay and my old life. I take a photograph of the sun setting over Westray and upload it to Facebook. My sky is converted into zeroes and ones, my personal data beamed to satellites, bounced through fibre-optic cables under the sea, through microwaves and copper wire, over islands, to you.

I am attracted to these places at the edge. I crave either life in the inner city or to go to islands beyond islands, islands of the dead. In a Hackney pub Gloria and I played pool with two guys who invited us back to their place across the road where they had some beers. Their place was a homeless hostel. A few nights later we were in a luxury hotel with a band, sneaking into the sauna in the early hours, spraying each other’s warm skin with plastic bottles of cold water until the fridge was empty. I want to have splendid success or to fail beautifully.

A part of me thinks that these wildly swinging fluctuations are, if not normal, at least desirable, and I grew to expect and even seek the edge. The alternative, of balance, seems pale and limited. I seek sensation and want to be more alive.

Personalities are formed by persistent, repeated actions, by learned patterns of behaviour and subtle approvals. Parents unconsciously influence their children to be some version of themselves.

the earth. In grandiose moments, high on fresh air and freedom on the hill, I study my personal geology. My body is a continent. Forces are at work in the night. A bruxist, I grind my teeth in my sleep, like tectonic plates. When I blink the sun flickers, my breath pushes the clouds across the sky and the waves roll into the shore in time with my beating heart. Lightning strikes every time I sneeze, and when I orgasm, there’s an earthquake. The islands’ headlands rise above the sea, like my limbs in the bathtub, my freckles are famous landmarks and my tears rivers. My lovers are tectonic plates and stone cathedrals.

St Tredwell, also known as Triduana, a ‘holy virgin’ or nun, was courted by Pictish King Nechtan, who admired her beautiful eyes. In response, Triduana gouged them out and sent them to him, skewered on a thorn. I read different accounts of the story, some saying that the king tried to rape her and her actions were self-preservation, others suggesting it was an act of love.

Jellyfish are the outline of a creature barely there, drifting in the currents, pelagic and intangible.

It doesn’t take long for this world to become my new reality. The swaying seaweed is reflected on the underside of the water’s surface, which has formed my new sky. It’s a grey, overcast day and when I pop my mask up above, I immediately want to get back under water – it’s brighter and bigger there. When I do stand up, I feel invincible in the wetsuit, able to walk through nettle patches and wade across lochs. Back home, I peel it off like a selkie’s skin.

The sea has more depth than land and even a small surface area reveals many layers; the possibilities of entering it make Orkney seem many times bigger.

I am free-falling but grabbing these things as I plunge. Maybe this is what happens. I’ve given up drugs, don’t believe in God and love has gone wrong, so now I find my happiness and flight in the world around me.

But I also think of the things I have found from the sea: the fishing boat, the seal, the ‘ambergris’. These things were worn out and washed-up but they were not always useless. They had tales to tell.

I like to think my figurine, now in my pocket with the Westray Wife, came from the wreck. For years it might have been buried in the seabed but a perfect combination of time elapsed, stormy seas, east winds and high tides brought it for me to find on this spot on Papay this winter. There is a cycle. The things we put into the sea come back to us – parts of the crushed car will be washed up again – but because the ocean is downhill from everywhere, they will go back there eventually. I wonder if I might find the shoe I lost in the London canal on an Orkney shore. As my time on Papay comes to an end, I am untethered and free-floating, like the jellyfish. I am wondering what’s next, standing back and allowing the unexpected to wash up at my feet.