Words

Seven Yellow Husbands

Rosie Priest

The first time I saw them, I was standing on Calton Hill, looking out towards the sea, in the
middle of a conversation about the future of my civil partnership.

Seven years. Seven towers.

I counted them, twice.

There they were, standing at the edge of Leith, seven enormous yellow creatures, their legs
planted on the shore, their complicated bodies rising into the skyline. They looked like
Triffids that had come out of the Firth of Forth to breed. Or to mourn. Or perhaps simply to
stand there, waiting for the tide to tell them what to do next.

I had never seen anything quite like them in this tiny city. Their yellow was not the yellow of
spring. It was a more insistent yellow, an industrial yellow, the yellow of warning signs,
poisonous frogs, emergency exits. A colour that seemed to say both come closer and keep
your distance.

I wanted to touch them.

I wanted to be very small beside them.

I wanted to climb inside one and sleep.

My civil partner and I had been together for nearly seven years. Seven years of accumulating
the particular tenderness that comes from knowing another person intimately. The private
language, the small rituals, the ways a body becomes familiar without ever becoming
entirely knowable. The knowledge of how someone likes their toast, how they move
through a room when they're tired, what makes them laugh when they don't particularly
want to.

Seven years of loving someone is a strange and beautiful thing.

And there I was, looking at seven enormous yellow structures, feeling something else
entirely, or perhaps not entirely else.

Perhaps the body has only so many ways of recognising beauty.

Around that time, I had slept with a man who had temporarily reorganised the furniture of
my mind.

Not in any particularly dramatic way. There had been skin, conversation, the ordinary
astonishment of another person's body. But afterwards something continued moving inside
me, long after the encounter itself had ended.

Limerence is the word for it, apparently.

A word that sounds like a mineral deposit, or a substance that might accumulate on the
underside of a boat.

I thought about him with an intensity that seemed entirely disproportionate to what had
happened. He occupied an enormous amount of mental space. He became a kind of internal
architecture. A structure I kept returning to, walking around, looking up at, trying to
understand.

I knew very little about him.

This was perhaps part of his appeal.

A person you barely know is wonderfully accommodating to fantasy. There are so many
empty rooms in which to install your own desires. I wondered how long he would remain
this vivid. Whether, eventually, the colour might begin to drain from him. Whether I would
be able to remember his body without feeling the entire landscape of myself rearrange.

The yellow towers were similarly generous.

They did not ask to be understood.

They simply stood there, enormous and yellow and available for projection.

There are people who fall in love with objects.

People who have married the Eiffel Tower, the Berlin Wall, their cars. People who
experience romantic and erotic attachments to structures, machines, monuments. I used to
find this difficult to understand, although I was always interested in the seriousness of their
devotion. Standing on Calton Hill, I felt something shift: I suddenly understood the
possibility of loving a thing that could not love you back.

Or perhaps that is the wrong way of putting it.

Who is to say what a tower feels?

Who is to say what a wall remembers?

A tower does not need to love you back in order for the love you feel to be real.

I thought about the Eiffel Tower, patiently receiving the affections of strangers. The Berlin
Wall, loved even as it divided people. The erotic possibilities of a suspension bridge. The
peculiar intimacy of a car that has carried your body across thousands of miles.
And then I looked again at my seven yellow creatures.

I wondered whether they were already spoken for.

Whether they would accept a proposal.

Whether I would have to marry them individually or whether some sort of collective
arrangement might be possible.

Seven husbands.

Seven years.

Seven enormous yellow husbands standing silently at the edge of the sea.

The towers made the city look briefly unfamiliar to itself.

I loved them for this.

I loved their scale, their awkwardness, their outrageous colour. I loved the fact that they
were so visible, so impossible to ignore, and yet so completely indifferent to being seen.
And I loved, perhaps most of all, that they were going to disappear.

The towers are not really towers. They are the foundations of offshore wind turbines.

Enormous steel jackets, temporarily assembled at Leith before being taken out to sea and
lowered onto the seabed.

Their legs will become the feet of something much larger.

The parts that currently dominate the skyline will be submerged. The yellow will vanish into
the green-black water. Fish will pass through their enormous bodies. Things will grow on
them. They will become a kind of artificial reef, an architecture for creatures that have
never heard of Edinburgh.

For now, they stand above us.

Soon, they will stand beneath us.

There is something almost unbearable about this.

To be so enormous, so beautiful, so briefly visible.

To exist in the collective imagination of a city for a moment, and then to disappear from
sight entirely. I wondered whether the sea might do something similar for me. Whether it
could take the enormous, brightly coloured thing I had made of this man and lower it gently
out of sight. Not destroy it. Just submerge it. Let the salt and the darkness work slowly on its
impossible colour, until what remained was something quieter.

I began to think about what it means to have someone take up space inside you.
The man I had slept with had become gigantic in my imagination. Much larger than the
actual man, who was, as far as I could tell, of fairly ordinary human dimensions. This is one
of the peculiar achievements of desire.

It can turn a person into a monument.

It can turn a moment into a landscape.

It can turn an absence into something you have to walk around.

My love for my civil partner was different. It had a history, a texture, a thousand small acts
of care. It was not a fantasy. Or not only a fantasy. It was made of actual days, actual bodies,
actual kindnesses. It had survived the ordinary indignities of being alive together.
And it was beautiful. It remains beautiful.

I wondered how these feelings could coexist. How I could love someone so deeply and still
feel the extraordinary electricity of someone else. How I could stand on a hill, full of
tenderness and uncertainty, and fall suddenly, absurdly in love with seven pieces of steel.

Perhaps love is not a finite resource.

Perhaps desire does not understand the boundaries we build around it.

Perhaps the heart is less like a house and more like a harbour, full of things arriving and
departing, some staying.