Over the sea, to Skye

by Maria Antonietta Carroni (Italy)

I didn't expect to find United Kingdom

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We had spent the whole day screaming. The typically noisy Italian family on vacation. We shrieked with wonder when the mountains opened and all of a sudden, liquid and steely, the loch appeared before us, smoothed by the lashing north wind. We screamed for warmth, Mediterranean people unprepared for the Highlands’ autumn. We yelled at each other, and that was because we missed each other, even though we were all there, together, in that wonderful valley where the green of the ferns began to fade in a rusty red. Speak, speak all the time, possibly loudly. Everything to fill that dense, tangible silence that enveloped us like a blanket as we marched through the glen, towards the Fairy Pools. Who knows, perhaps a small part of us feared them, those spiteful fairies of Anglo-Saxon legends known for kidnapping lost people. And we were, lost. In more than one sense. And so we resorted to our old unwritten rule: when you’re lost, make noise. Sing as you walk; scream delighted when you see a deer - to the point of making it run away; take it out on your parents, on your sister, on your brother-in-law, for the long time you have been separated, because you live in different states, because five days in Scotland are not enough to mend that separation, and you already dread the moment those days are over and everyone returns to their life, miles and miles apart. Until that other sound comes. In a pub the size of a barn - and perhaps it was, once, a barn - the piercing hum of families at dinner, the bursts of laughter, and then there it is, the music. They are just kids, a local band. But the songs they play are so old. Over the Sea to Skye, The Wild Rover, Annie Laurie. There, it’s where we stopped screaming. From the ferry to Armadale to Portree’s colours, from Sligachan Old Bridge to Dunvegan Castle, between stone and peat, we left behind weights we didn't know we were carrying. Every corner of Skye demands total attention: even between the valleys and the mountains, or on the loch’s shore, away from the three-houses villages and castles where a story of independence and pride is told, a story that is not that of the United Kingdom; even there, alone in its ancient nature, one feels observed. "Look at me, learn me, take my peace and do something good with it". Skye takes a space in the heart and the mind, fills the eyes with wild beauty. This is what autumn in Scotland does to you. It holds you in a grip of icy, invigorating wind. It makes you feel small with its smooth, looming, alien mountains. It forces you to spit out every lump of pain and resentment that you have dared to bring on its infinite, rocky coasts. It empties you. And then it fills you up again.