The ocean was alive. As I perched on the roof of the crumbling cathedral, I could see the tangle of cottages and streets that was my world, and I could see the end of my world where the earth fell into the sea. Rock met water in a tumble of spray as the ocean tried to claw its way onto dry land. Beyond that, a world brimming with crimson-sailed ships and white-tipped waves stretched into the horizon. A world of chaos and change. A world of possibility.

Wind swirled around my head, buffeting my back as it tried to push me towards the harbor. Not for the first time, I wondered what Grandma would think if she knew that I snuck up here every time she traveled to Edinburgh. Once every month she left my side, and once every month I betrayed her.

“You’re not betraying anyone,” I muttered, willing myself to believe the words. “All you’ve ever done is look. You’ve never left.”

That was all I ever did with my life. I looked, I watched, and I waited. After all those years, I still expected my parents to sail home, scoop me up in their arms, and whisk me off to their land, a land floating in the aroma of spices and the music of foreign voices.

Grandma always got this look in her eyes when I talked about that land. She had a different theory about what had happened to my parents. The kind of theory that any adult would form when a couple embarks on a two-week sailing trip and never returns. I used to kneel by her creaky, soot-stained chair and tell her over and over again that her daughter would come home. At the moment, she and my father were busy scouring the globe for the kind of place they used to tell me stories about, where the houses were gold and the grass blazed like fire and the flowers were shards of electric blue sky. And when they found that place, they would come back for us.

But no matter how many times I pleaded with Grandma to believe me, she would keep her eyes fixed on the wool in her hand, looping her needles through, under, and over in the same pattern that she had used all her life. I had watched Grandma knit thousands of scarves, and they were all black and grey, black and grey, twining around each other in never-ending lines. Her ashen hands never ceased moving, not even when tears spilled down my cheeks and I yelled, “Well what do you think, then? That they’re dead? That they’ve forgotten us?”

Grandma’s needles would click a little harder, and the lines around her mouth would stretch a little tighter, but no sound would pass her lips. And her silence would whisper the words that she couldn’t bear to speak.

Now, as I balanced on the wall surrounding the cathedral roof, I bit down on my lip, as I always did when my thoughts neared that idea, that one I had sworn never to consider. The sensation of blood seeping into my mouth had long since become a soothing pain. I was about to slide off the weather-beaten wall and begin the trek back home when a shriek shattered my ears. A tsunami of wind crashed over my huddled form, cackling as it sunk its fangs into my exposed flesh and tore at my hair, my face, my clothes. With a vicious tug, it wrenched my mother’s scarf from around my neck and raced towards the harbor. My hands shot forward, but the scarf was just a smudge of pink in the distance. Then it was gone.

My mother had worn that scarf every day I could remember; after years of stroking the cashmere, the dye had faded to a rosy pink that blended into her skin and brightened her Caribbean green eyes. The last time I saw those eyes, I had hunched, shivering, in the shadow of my parent’s ship. My mother’s arms had folded around me, her copper hair tickling my eyelashes. As she pulled away, she slipped off her scarf and bundled it around my neck. She told me she wouldn’t need it where she was going, where sunlight swam in the air like iridescent mist, enveloping the world in endless warmth and turning grey into gold. Still, she was coming home soon, and who else could she trust to look after it until then?

But she hadn’t returned. She hadn’t returned even when time had worn her scarf threadbare and her mother had tried to forget her and her son had spent day after day staring out at the sea, waiting for royal blue sails to crest the horizon. That scarf had been my mother’s final promise. I had held onto it all these years. And now it had slipped through my fingers, and I was still suspended between a world of color and a world of grey, waiting for a miracle.  

And all of a sudden, I couldn’t take it anymore. I couldn’t take this town. I couldn't take the feeling of trudging across dry, unchanging land for the rest of my life, couldn’t bear the thought of seeing in grey forever. I looked out at the ocean, at the blues and green and reds shimmering in the sunrise, and I ran. I ran down the steps, crumbling beneath the dust of centuries, ran across the rolling grass. I tore down grey streets that stretched between grey houses, and I tripped but never stopped. I shoved past fathers in austere black suits, mothers in colorless dresses, and children forced to don shapeless, charcoal garments for church.

The streets zigzagged in a maze of narrow paths, but I sprinted on. Left, right, forward, under an arch, down, down, down the steps until I burst out into the harbor. A forest of timber masts towered into the sky. The stink of gutted fish, salt, and hundreds of men that had gone for days without showering blasted my nose, and for a second I was lost among a sea of shoving bodies and scarlet sails.

Then a splash of pink fluttered across the deck of a birlinn. Stumbling aboard the ship, I snatched up the scarf with my scraped, sweaty hands and clutched it to my chest. I could hear footsteps, footsteps and the raucous calls of sailors yearning to be back at sea. After a second’s hesitation, I ducked into the cargo hold. A minute later, the floor began to dip, swell, and roll beneath my trembling body.

“I’m on my way,” I whispered into the velvety fabric of the scarf, willing my parents to hear me from across the sea. “I’m on my way.”