The world feels like it’s falling apart at the seams today. War in Ukraine and it’s getting hotter, hotter, the bills are rising like the sea levels and the front door of my flat is rattling in the wind. It’s like the wood is straining to keep it all at bay and the crises are pushing up against it – let us in.

I open the door and the empty hallway is a shock. Out onto Rose Street and everyone seems to be normal. Every time there is a once-in-a-lifetime event, every year it seems, I walk outside and people somehow manage to continue their lives. I feel like screaming, running up to the old couple window shopping and shaking them – do you not know what’s happening?

But I don’t, and look like everyone else as I walk to work. The daffodils have blossomed and I feel a smile spread across my face the likes of which hasn’t been seen for weeks. There is moss growing out of a car window. It’s saying yes, I am here. Alive. I look up and the winter sun is clinging to steeples, almost as if it is saying yes, I am here.

At work and one of the children asks me if I can do a Scottish accent and I sheepishly say I can’t. Everyone says moving to Edinburgh from England is hardly like moving at all but I don’t believe them. Scotland will be taking Ukrainian refugees. I found out last week that period products are free here. It feels like, in some ways, I have moved somewhere where things make sense. In some ways, I have come home even though I’m so far from anything I’ve called that before.

The sky is streaked with pink as I walk home, and I am late enough to catch the first Friday night pub-goers, already merry and taking advantage of the pedestrian street to walk four abreast. I wonder if their heads buzz with a sense of dread like mine does. I make eye contact with a woman and try and figure out if she can see it in me like I’m trying to see it through hers.

Pernina Jacobs