on going 'home'

to the sea! and my friends! and people on dating apps who love rock climbing!

On Wednesday, I went home. Not home in any current definition of the word, but for four years, that was the name I gave it. Over lunch with my parents while on a weekend trip to actual home, where I was raised and now live again, I would declare ‘I’m getting the train home on Sunday’, and then jump in to correct myself. ‘Not home. You know what I mean. Back.’ But it was home, in an entirely ethereal sense, even when I thought I’d stay there forever.

Last time I went back I got so drunk that I sprinted full pelt down the high street and spent the next morning shivering profusely in my friend’s double bed. It was November, the worst possible time of year to visit a city whose main pull is its proximity to the sea. I was Not In A Good Place, but desperately trying to insinuate that I was, the effort of it probably betraying just how lost I felt. I must have spent at least half of the 43 hours I was there drunk or hungover. Truthfully, it didn’t feel like there was much else to do, and there was definitely a lot to drink about. It was nothing like I remembered it being. It didn’t feel like home. If it was, it was a broken one.

But as I stepped off the train eight months later, air sticky and thick with the sound of students heading out, graduation gowns swapped for little tops and skirts and jeans and baggy shirts, everything felt more familiar. The boys still had silly facial hair. The girls were still mostly blonde. The seagulls still insisted on being heard at 11pm. Everyone on Feeld (which I opened to browse before sleep, like some kind of carnal shopping channel) was into rock climbing. We were so back. It was like we had never left.

After I moved out last August, I almost didn’t have time to miss it. I went away with my best friends, so the goodbyes were delayed. I managed to avoid crying at the airport, just, and then as soon as I was back in London, I had a new course to get to grips with, a new job, new friends. But in quiet moments I found myself aching for my old home, wishing things were different and I was in my old flat next to the cathedral again, with its palatial living room. On Saturday mornings, I missed hearing the children’s choir in the hall next door confidently sinking their little teeth into a well-loved noughties hit. I missed walks on the quayside, and board game nights spent losing focus thanks to badly mixed cocktails. I wanted to relive what it felt like to crawl into bed in the middle of the afternoon in the house I lived in for two years, sunburned from the beach, and wake up as golden light filtered into my bedroom. I wondered if the indie club still sold Fudge bars, if my nail tech would recognise me if I walked into her salon again. It felt like I was always remembering something I’d buried, trying to access the version of myself who’d held a sleeping kitten to her chest, full in the knowledge that if my landlord found it, we were toast. Who’d run into the sea and get out two minutes later to capture my friends jumping in the waves, wanting it to be more permanent than it could be.

this was the view from my work for a whole year. silly.

I was a different girl there, several different girls. Not better, or worse, just alien to me now. There is a kind of boldness that can only be nurtured with no real adults around, just me and my friends and every silly thing we ever did, some recorded in elaborate colour-coded graphs, on private Instagram stories, in pictures and texts that will never see the light of day. There’s a kind of sadness that takes root in years like that, too. An ache, an understanding that this is for now, and being serious is for later, but that serious is coming. That we are on borrowed time.

I felt it for the whole time I was visiting. I am a ‘visitor’, now. I had a very tangible return ticket. I would pass through the city, leaving nothing behind. But it is easy to romanticise a place so built for being enjoyed at the precise time I was visiting – humid, unrelenting July, the tail end of a heatwave. When you can take a boat to a pub and watch a collie repeatedly dive into the river after a ball, then catch a train to the beach and swim as the sun is starting to set. The next day, it poured, but it didn’t matter – we blasted brat down the motorway, we explored Agatha Christie’s old holiday home, laughed at just how much crap she owned and envied her never-ending gardens and greenhouses. We returned to the beach the day I left, and it felt like the perfect day – hot doughnuts coating my sunburnt chest with sugar, drying out in the sun, shivering in the waves like all the times before.

tourist in a very lovely greenhouse

Once, years ago, on one of my birthday beach trips, the water was crystal clear. I barely even believe it now, but it’s true. The waves had churned the sand up and an island had formed a little way out. We swam to it and lay on the sand surrounded by sea. It was all impossibly warm, impossibly perfect. I often catch myself asking people who were there if it really happened – if we could really see little shoals, if we really made it to the sandbank, if we really lay there. Was it really that perfect? Did we really get to live in this place, together, in love with all of it for so long? Were we really that lucky?

About twenty minutes into swiping absentmindedly on Feeld, in the single bed on the top floor of my friends’ house, I stumbled across someone from my past. I immediately closed it, fired off several messages in several group chats and lay there for a while, unsure whether I found this development hilarious or sickening. Maybe both? Weird, definitely. Perhaps the most brutal of reminders that, no matter how familiar everything felt, or how clear the sea had been once, two years ago, this place was not for me anymore.

And I’d known that all along, really. Since I moved out of my university city (a glorified town that just happened to have a cathedral) just shy of a year ago, I’ve felt less and less homesick, more sure of my decision to leave, and to never move back.

It’s not just the heartbreak, even though that’s gone now. It’s how small it is. The seagulls, always threatening to ruin a picnic. The alleys that always smell freshly pissed-in. The sheer audacity of the hills. The inability of a single bus to be anywhere it has promised to be, ever. The men yelling outside my flat, and the time it was so bad I huddled under my duvet and called the police. All the times I cried, balled-up in bed or crouching on a kitchen floor. All the mistakes I made that still feel too close to run from. When I sat on the stairs and begged on the phone to come home, and it was so clear in my mind that that word didn’t mean here.

I have outgrown this place. I think it has outgrown me too. It is seeing other people. We’re being mature about it. I notice its new restaurants and shops, and raise it my tattoo, all the things I’ve learned while I’ve been gone, the person I have become in spite of everything that happened here.

For now, home is my mother texting to ask which evenings I’ll be in for dinner. It’s bookshelves double parked with books I’ve not read, and bags of clothes I’m trying to sell exploding onto the floor. It’s trekking for at least 40 minutes for an overpriced drink in a noisy pub. Maybe soon home will be somewhere else.

But for nearly four years, it was all of this: being carried on someone’s back through freezing cold waves. Walking to the Premier in sliders and stopping halfway up the road to capture the prettiest sunset I’d ever seen. Asking my friend to explain the rules of the board game again. And again. Sitting in the cemetery by my house with a book and whatever I’d mustered the energy to bake. Never being more than a ten-minute walk from someone who loved me. Falling asleep in club toilets, topping up my lipstick in club toilets, convincing myself I was in love in club toilets. Falling in love, or what I thought was love, at least twice romantically and almost every day with a friend, or a view, or a baked good. The seagulls’ insistent screams. The sea, clear and beautiful and warm, the only time it ever was. The sense that this was all a dream, that one day I’d wake up. And I did. And all of it was real all along. And I can’t go back to how it was, then. But I can go back. It can be ‘home’ for a weekend, even if it’ll never be home again.