TIRE TRACKS ON THE A9

You once swore I was more than all the miles between our names,

but you folded like the heath in winter, halfway up the A9.

Your voice ghosted out—

a signal lost in sleet—

right as you passed the turnoff to my father’s empty town.

You kept driving north, into storm country,

and left our future stranded

at the junction pointing southwest.

Now I’m stuck between anger

and a blame that keeps rewriting itself.

Memory won’t dissolve—

not with whisky, not with smoke—

it just replays like a CCTV on a feedback loop.

And the weather terrifies me now;

you appear in every rain-static blur,

face smeared by the windscreen wipers.

Doc told me to travel—

but the planes are all quarantined ghosts,

nothing but long metal coffins humming over the Atlantic.

And I love the Highlands,

but it’s the season of bare branches

and sheep bones under frost.

I saw your mother in Inverness—

she blinked, searching her memory

as if I was an unscanned barcode.

Maybe that’s on me;

I always rehearse the role of the victim

like a prayer I never meant to learn.

So I dream each night of some version of you—

a parallel self I never had,

but somehow never lost.

Now you’re tire tracks pressed into peat,

and a single pair of shoes left by my door.

And I’m split in half—

and that will have to do.

I thought if I built something bright

on top of all my inherited ruin,

I could drown the darkness

passed down from my father’s silence.

But the maths don’t balance.

Even the ledger of the land won’t save me.

I’m not funny anymore—

your laughter was the tuning fork for my whole personality.

You once called me “forever,”

now you won’t even call me back.

The echo is the cruelest part.

And I love the Highlands,

but they’re nothing but stripped branches now.

I saw your mother again—

she turned away like I was weather.

Half my fault, sure—

but I cradle the victimhood

like a dying coal in my chest.

So I dream each night of some version of you—

a hologram walking through heather,

untouched by decision or consequence.

Now you’re tire tracks fading into fog,

and I’m a cracked stone on the roadside—

split clean through,

and that will have to do.

My other half was you.

I hope this pain is just a migrant storm

passing over the Cairngorms—

but I doubt it.

The wind keeps whispering your name

in the old Gaelic vowels

nobody uses anymore.

I love the Highlands,

but everything here reminds me

of what did—

and did not—

survive.

I dream each night of the version of you

that walks alongside me

in the places we never reached.

Your shoes by the door,

your absence in the room.

I’m split in half,

and it will have to do.

It will have to—

do.