‘Re-visiting my university city’
I’m visiting my university city this week, after nearly a year, and in all honesty, I’m slightly dreading it. It’s one of my closest friends' boyfriends' birthday party (convoluted link), but with a ping on my phone, I was added to a WhatsApp group. Subsequently, I booked the days off work and then had a mini panic attack when I looked at train prices, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn’t initially excited. It has all the tenets of a fun night: fancy dress, two of my closest friends and my favourite club in the city. Moving back home to my tiny suburban village has me itching for a two am rendition of Mr Brightside, trainers sticking to familiar vinyl floors.
But then I got thinking about the long train ride I'd have to take to get there. Those four hours I will spend staring out the window, looking out at the countryside, before arriving at ‘that’ station, and I start to feel slightly nauseous, my pulse racing as if under attack, the shiver you get when smelling an old perfume. But why? Overall, I really enjoyed university. Admittedly, I picked the wrong course but managed to wrangle a 2.1 with sheer force of will, landing myself with only a handful of grey hairs for the effort. The ‘Bachelor of Law’ that hangs in my parents' living room stares mockingly at me (the university didn’t even divert from Arial for their official documents, and I believe that typeface will forever haunt me); that flimsy sheet of A4 was not worth the tears it caused. I made a handful of wonderful friends, and I hope to keep them forever (for those who know me, that can be taken as a threat). I lived with my best friends, I loved, I learnt how to take care of myself and God, I had so much fun!
That being said, you couldn’t pay me to relive it. Maybe because my formative teenage years were spent in isolation (thank you, covid), I experienced the majority of my emotional growing pains in early adulthood. I consumed those three years painfully trying to arrange myself into who I thought I was, and who I desperately wanted to be. Alongside learning the basics, that drinking a full bottle of Echo Falls on an empty stomach can quickly send a night spiralling in one of two directions, and that some people are just completely mental, and you will probably live with one of them in second year. I developed an unfortunate habit of losing myself, rebuilding everything, only to have to do it all over again. I eventually figured out that my adolescent emotional immaturity and biting insecurity were not effective forms of self-protection but an ugly growth that needed to be surgically removed from my body. I look back at the way I handled certain situations, guided by their hands, and I wish I could change them. Artfully pick out the stitches they left in my life without chewing up the fabric, an impossible exercise. It took me some time to form solid connections, and I can still feel the slow gnawing of my first-year loneliness if I think too hard. I am happy to say I hardly recognise that girl who told her parents not to stay too long when they dropped her off because she didn’t want to seem childish to her new flatmates, but if I were to see her again, I'd kindly tell her to stop wearing natural deodorant and maybe give her a hug.
Perhaps that’s what's making me feel sick? The inconsistency of the experience, the city has seen every ugly inch of me, all those painfully awkward years of self-discovery that felt like an acceleration of manic flailing as I tried to stay afloat. I feel like I will be able to visualise them on my return, all those embarrassing episodes of life now stagnant in between my old houses and seminar rooms, my fingerprints still sticky on the pavement. Maybe I just want to leave those parts of me behind, let the dust settle around them, let her have the city to herself, let her rest. I think I’m craving somewhere clean, and returning in some ways feels like taking a step back. I have moved on, my life there has gone and left. A picture book of scenery I lent my pink hair against after I bleached my curls stringy at 18, and I used to come home most weekends to escape my crazy flatmates. That bench down at the Quay, where I laughed hysterically until I cried at 19, and sunbathing at the river with my housemates at 20, tinnies and chocolate covered strawberries to match. Pages of scrappy iterations, those hills could thumb through them all, but I think it’s time to close the covers.
I reckon this will be the last time I go back, and I’m excited to properly say goodbye. I want to find different local haunts and learn the unevenness of new pub steps. It is not my home now, and I don’t think it ever was. I was taught to always leave on a high, I have picked my flowers, why would I waste my time looking around for more? Maybe if I do, I’ll just find weeds.
To end on a less melodramatic note - To Exeter, what a ride. (If you cringed with me, you have to like and follow ;))