Notes from a Time Traveller by Elke Stevens

A woman who travelled to Belfast with two monster suitcases and a heart full of questions.

This isn’t a story about travel.
It’s a story about learning where, and with whom, I belong.

I tell stories from the in‑between, between places, identities, certainties.
My life tends to unfold awkwardly, honestly, and slightly chaotically, and I write from there.

I didn’t arrive in Belfast gracefully. Barely seated on the plane, I was already performing the classic “tiny‑aeroplane chair dance,” wondering whether I should feel excited, terrified, homesick, bold, or something else entirely. The truth was simpler: I didn’t know what I was losing, and I didn’t yet know what I was about to find.

As the engines roared and Brussels tilted away beneath a sharp left turn, I felt butterflies — the unmistakable sense that something was beginning, even if I couldn’t name it yet.

Landing in Dublin, I stepped off the plane with the confidence of a seasoned traveller… which lasted exactly five seconds. Then came the two enormous suitcases, my “twin sisters”, threatening to bury me alive at baggage claim. I dragged them through narrow gates, sweating, swearing, and looking like a thin, overcooked version of Mr Bean.

Awkwardness: 1 Me: 0

At the bus counter, the hostess told me the Belfast bus would leave in 5 minutes. I could have waited for the next one, but of course, I had to take that one. I wrestled my luggage toward the bus, ready to cry, when a stranger appeared and asked, “Will I help you with your twin sister?” “Yes, please,” I said, half‑laughing, half‑dying. “What are you carrying?” “My wardrobe. And some good memories.”

Light travel has never been my style.

By the time I reached Belfast, I was exhausted, lost, and still dragging those monsters behind me. Asking directions didn’t help, every Irishman told me the hotel was “just at the end of the road,” which could mean five minutes or five miles. Their English was fast, musical, and nothing like the English I learned in school.

But eventually, I found the hotel. The receptionist looked at my oversized luggage and asked if I was relocating. “Who knows,” I said. She gave me a room on the top floor with a skyline view, a small kindness that felt like a beginning.

That was the beginning.
Not the decision, not the journey… just the moment I noticed it.

After about 4 years in Belfast, I’m moving even further up north.

The Island Years.

Shetland came with wind, salt, and a kind of welcome that tests you before it holds you.

I took the ferry, but my car didn’t make it with me. There wasn’t enough space, so it was sent on a freight boat. Except some peanut‑head offloaded it during a sailing stop in Orkney… and forgot to put it back on. So I arrived in Shetland with no car, no clean clothes, smelling like the North Sea.

Customer service at the ferry terminal saved me, handing me a large service car to use until mine arrived. A small miracle.
What followed was not so much a miracle.

At the accommodation, I was given the wrong key.
No access. No clean clothes. No shower. Just waiting.

Two days later, my car finally arrived. Packed to the top. I picked it up, drove straight to work, still carrying the journey with me, still not quite settled into my own skin.

That night, in a storm, my tyre exploded on a pitch‑black road. I couldn’t find the safety bolt to change the spare. I didn’t know a single soul on the island.

So I did the only thing I could do. I left the car and walked.

Back to the workplace. Night shift had started. I knocked, lights flashing, until someone saw me and let me in. I texted a coworker. She picked me up. I slept on a couch.

Welcome to Shetland.

Management may not have understood.
But people did. And that’s where it changed. Because even in the chaos, I made friends.

The Western Isles, Softer Winds

A few months later, I moved to the Western Isles.
 This time, everything went smoother.

I made friends I still talk to today, people who held space for me, laughed with me, and helped me breathe again.

And then came the most slapstick moment of all: I left the island for a new job, but it fell through just as I was travelling to the mainland… now I didn’t know what was coming next.

Fortune favours the bold or the bewildered. One of my coworkers was travelling south the same day, and I offered her a lift.

Two strangers in a car became two friends, saying goodbye. Life has a strange way of weaving people together.

Lost in the Highlands: The Waiting Game

Somewhere along the way, I found myself in the Highlands, sitting in a café in Thurso, staring out of a mud-stained window, waiting for news that would decide my next step. .

Music in the background. A glass of wine in front of me. Time… stretching.

I realised something then.

I couldn’t go back.
I couldn’t stay where I was.
And I had no idea what the next hour would bring.

But I was there. Fully.

Seeing, hearing, tasting, and feeling everything. Even the vibration of each guitar string in the room.

Not stuck.
Just… in between.

The Leap to Orkney, a frantic leap from where I’m standing.

Behind the scenes, things were moving. Phone calls. Decisions. A leap of faith. I trusted a stranger to help me, and they did.

And then, finally, what I didn’t expect and resisted at first, I crossed the Pentland Firth and arrived in Orkney.

This wasn’t just another island. This was the one that felt like recognition.

Somewhere between the ferry terminal and the wind‑carved cliffs, I realised the truth:

A woman who has lived between worlds. A woman who sheds skins and finds new ones. A woman who belongs to the sea and the shore at the same time.

Orkney wasn’t a stop. It is a place between temporalities, a potential homecoming.

Because “settled” is the wrong word.

The islands don’t just change where you live.
They change how you move, how you listen, how you understand belonging. It teaches you!

And they taught me that direction is rarely literal.
That “the end of the road” is not always a place.
And that strangers often become the people who carry you through.

About the Blog, and why I told you this story?

Because this is how my life tends to unfold: awkward, honest, slightly chaotic, and full of unexpected meaning.

I am a storyteller, a philosopher, a neurodivergent woman who sees the world sideways and writes from the edges where humour, myth, and lived experience meet.

This is my story, still unfolding.©️ Elke T.B. Stevens