Between Worlds

✏️Between Worlds

I moved from Spain to the UK two days before my eighteenth birthday, carrying a big old red suitcase and a brown canvas shoulder bag. Inside: about twenty cassette tapes, a book, and not much else. I’d forgotten to pack a towel, so the first thing I bought was a soft blue one that cost more than it should have. I remember feeling very proud of it, and then, almost immediately, very homesick. Like my notebooks from back then, I still have it, in all its old towel ryvita textured glory (good for muddy dogs & kids!).

I’d been to the UK before: summers with family, brief visits, the kind that make you feel you already know a place. But moving “officially” was different. I signed up for a secretarial course, the practical kind of thing that promised employability and structure. For three months, I typed, filed, and learned to answer phones in brisk English tones. I also failed to make a single friend. Thank goodness for my cousin, who became my steady point in those first strange months.

Inside, I was French/Spanish third culture kid with a “Danish” wrapper (apparently- I kept being told I looked Danish!). Technically, I was British. Fluent on paper. But in practice, I was decoding everything: tone, humour, rhythm, unspoken rules. Banter, for example, was a concept completely beyond me. My humour was too European, my cultural references a half-beat off. Except for a surprisingly in depth knowledge of the Goon Show, Monty Python & Dad’s Army. People took me for quiet, reserved. Maybe a bit weird. In truth, I was just trying to translate the world in real time.

Looking back, I think that’s when my writer’s ear really started forming. I was always listening: to the pauses, to what people didn’t say, to the ways even weather could change a conversation. At the time, I was writing short stories and poems, mostly for myself, though I sent some in lieu of letters to friends. Little sketches of thought, of displacement, of belonging. But those early months taught me something that would never leave: that story begins in noticing.

That feeling of being between worlds, not quite from here, not quite from there, has followed me ever since. It’s become the quiet undercurrent in everything I write. Whether in poetry or fiction, I’m still trying to map that space: the moment when language falters but meaning rushes in anyway.

I didn’t know it then, but that blue towel, those cassette tapes, the silence of unfamiliar rooms: they were all research, in their own way. The first notes of a life spent listening.

I think that’s why, all these years later, I write about characters who live between places, people who feel slightly out of step in the very spaces where they’re meant to belong. That uncertainty, that searching, is where story lives for me.

As I draft notes for my next (third) novel, I’m still drawn to those in-between moments: where home is complicated, language stretches thin, and connection comes through listening rather than certainty.

Maybe that’s what writing is to me: the art of finding your footing in the spaces between.