As I sat in my childhood room for the last time listening to The Cure and thinking about all the other 23-year-olds who soundtracked their goodbyes with Robert Smith, I realised that I am a part of the lucky few who will be moving out during UK lockdown number three. Up until this point, I had only felt excitement about leaving the four walls I had spent the past almost-year staring at, willing the virus away.
It hit me. I wasn’t going to get a goodbye to the place that raised me. As I walked down the scruffy Highstreet with a friend I will miss dearly – two metres apart and desperately holding onto our costa coffees trying to infuse its warmth through our gloved hands – I realised the landscape of my childhood hasn’t changed. The only markers of time are the countless charity shops that replaced Poundland’s, and the bar that closed down and re-opened every five years under a different name. Them, and me of course. I began to reflect on how these ever-same shop faces have watched me close down and re-open every couple of years with a new hair colour and group of friends. I did a lot of changing in my youth. It wasn’t a bad thing or a good thing. I was just desperately trying to get to know myself. Turns out, I’m not bad.
This place is loaded. I walked up and down this road every single day from when I was 11 to when I was 18. This path knows my footstep and I know its terrain. I made friends here, real ones and bad ones. I remember it all, I remember telling my mum I was staying late at school and going to the park with the ‘popular girls’ I was desperate to get ‘in’ with; I never did, but that’s not the point. I remember sitting at the top of the castle mound with Flora and prank calling boys from someone’s lost address book, pretending they’d knocked us up. I remember my first boyfriend, how we met once and then broke up because he told me he was doing homework but I saw on BBM that he was playing Fifa with the guy I actually liked. It was glorious, it was hormonal and acne-ridden, but it was a notable youth.
Things got harder when I left for university, but I guess that’s part in parcel of growing up. I spent a lot more time here than I anticipated, created more memories that I won’t be saying goodbye to. Things like the strangely beautiful opera house I knew as Spoons, where I’d be four shots in trying to shag some girl from my sixth form’s older brother to no avail. I’ll probably never attend our traditional Thursday night springtime jazz on the cobbles with the girls who left before me. Jazz on the cobbles - If you haven’t already guessed, I grew up in Kent. I’ll probably never go to the beach with them again, something we were sure would become a tradition, but never did.
The weird thing is, I know that if I was able to say goodbye to it all, there wouldn’t be much to say. I can look back now, but hindsight has an annoying tendency to rose tint my memories. If I dig deeper than surface level, I know that, mostly, all I really have to say goodbye to is a lot of pain. I spent many, many years witnessing the world through a lens of severe mental illness. I don’t want it to define me and I like to think it doesn’t, but I lost a chunk of my youth to it. While it can be fun to walk around the familiar streets and remember the mischief I got up to, I know why I was doing it. It wasn’t carefree, it wasn’t fun. It was a desperate cry for help that disguised itself within a bottle of vodka, pink hair dye, and long sleeves. I cried a lot. I was really lonely. I didn’t have good friends to cry into for a long time, not like I do now. The anger I felt at it all only had space to reflect inwards, into myself. I spent a lot of this year cleaning up the mess I made when I was younger. It’s relatively tidy now, but there are a few shelves that could be dusted.
I guess all I am saying is that goodbye is a big word. There’s a lot here. A lot of everything, the good, the bad, and the mundane in between. This time is different, I know it’s for real. There are no more long summers or freedom to be bored. There will be no more skipping school to go to the beach. No more first dances to Ed Sheeran or midnight feasts. I’m leaving a lot behind; a great big messy cloud of lust, boredom, blood, tears, belly laughs, trampoline sleepovers, Primark sunglasses, and New Look jeans. First drinks and last days of school. It belongs to my past and it's happy there. I don’t want it back, I don’t want to be young again, not at all. I just want it all to be for something. I think it might be.
As I came home from seeing the flat I am moving into on Friday, I realised that it was going to be the last time I walked through those station doors to be on my way back, not on my way there. The next time I walk that stretch to this house, it won’t be mine anymore. The next time I come here, I’ll ring the doorbell. I’ll be a guest. My room will be the same for a while, my mum would never erase my trace from it, but it will be emptier. My life will be in London with the girl who grew up with me. Who saw it all, the good, the bad, and the mundane in between. And we’ll start it all again, the new grown-up youth. The young adult. We will laugh into the sunrise and howl at the moon. We’ll paint the town red and blue. We’ll make new memories to look back on, to one day say a choked up goodbye to. By then we’ll be much older, perhaps we’ll know more about what ‘this thing called life is’ - probably not but that’s okay. It doesn’t stop though, it’s all just one big cauldron of shit. I’m ready to stir it up and see what it gives me. I’m ready to blindly throw myself into the future and hope it catches me. I’m ready to be the person I spent years cultivating. The person who has my bittersweet youth to thank, the person I was born to be.
