The Complications of Home

An unexpected feeling has become apparent now I have been at university for a couple of months, one which I never truly anticipated. University, with all its knowledge and growth, forces a form of limbo on its students that is never explained by anybody. It’s a strange feeling moving to a completely new city and knowing nobody, it’s exciting and uncomfortable at the same time, yet no matter how hard the first few weeks are, you adjust. Soon the normality begins to sink in, routine takes place and it becomes simply another way of life. The shock is that returning home then after settling in is almost as unsettling as the move originally was. The warmth of home, the feeling of family and a familiar setting exuberate happiness and safety, yet the town and its inhabitants no longer feel the same. The streets, the old walks, the nostalgia laden scenes feel like a dear friend you haven’t seen in years, a part of you, but one in which you no longer belong. The caresses of the sea breeze feel nourishing yet external, not a part of the bloodstream you used to feel connected you to this peninsula. The dissonance between myself and home that ethereally appeared is something once unfathomable, yet disturbingly real.

I am an extremely lucky student. I was lucky enough to share my chosen city of study with my girlfriend, gratefully allowing me to merge the warmth and familiarity of home with the unfamiliar, despondent face of Bristol. Yet this does not change the unsettling feeling I am left with after visiting my home town for the first time since I left. Everything is exactly the same, yet I feel different. Even after a mere four weeks.

Yet halls are far from a replacement, what is abundantly clear is that Bristol will never be my home. It’s impossible to compare them, whereas the city’s streets run white with people rushing every which way like salmon, home runs stagnant as a canal on a midsummer’s night. Selsey provides seclusion and isolation, two things I’ve always deemed essential to me, whereas Bristol provides nightlife and excitement, an abundance of midnight strangers and endless possibilities. It is new and exciting, yet I am not connected to it. It could be left in an instant without a second thought, it could never replace the docile, sluggish life of home. But it has changed me. I still retain the influences of home, yet I am no longer content to merely exist. I need movement and energy, aspiration and possibilities. As much as I love my home, I fear I have outgrown it.

Selsey, the town of my adolescence, shall always remain a part of me. The road I was raised on, the house I was raised in, shall always be mine. No doubt I will regularly return, for no matter how much I may have changed I could never, I would never want too, stop going back. The people there are far too important. The feelings that overcome me when I return there shall always be safe and familiar and happy, yet I am no longer a part of that town. It’s not true that you can build a home wherever you want, your home is given to you from birth. It is as much a part of you as your personality, it is unchangeable and infinite, and no matter how much we derogate and curse our dawdling towns that exist secluded from the rest of the world, we love them more than words can express.

Short Story: The Ghost of Glenside

This is my first attempt at a short story for a magazine in a long time! The magazine asked for a Halloween-esqe short story, so this is based off of my girlfriends university accommodation that was once a asylum for the insane. Relatively generic I know, but who doesn't look a classically cheesy horror story for Halloween? Exactly.

Click click click THUD. Click click click THUD. The monotonous beat beats on. Three taps of the knuckle, one slam of the skull. Click click click THUD. The patriotic sound of the insane asylum, the national anthem of the crazy box. Wallow knows this song all too well. She knows it will continue long after the box has consumed her, long after it has consumed everything. When every star has been devoured by supermassive black holes, every quasar of light vacuumed from every galaxy, all that shall be left is the void – and the everlasting click click click THUD; the national anthem of the crazy box.

Wallow still remembers the days before the box claimed her. Before it’s surgically dressed minions stole her from the twilight of her father’s farm, from the smell of pollen and rapeseed, revealing their dirtied souls in the process which the clinical cloaks withheld. She remembered running through the forest, feeling the tickle of branches, playing hide and seek with the invisible forest creatures, inevitably losing (for who can beat an invisible creature at hide and seek?) yet relishing in the chase nonetheless. She remembers creating dens underneath the roots of great oaks, how the walls and the dirt and the creatures made her feel so secure, so strong. It was the same reason she hid underneath shelly, the victim of a misfired shot of her father, when he came looking for her. It was the same reason the clinical minions had to drag her from her mother’s cold arms before she would be taken to the box. It was the same reason why she was a part of the box, and the box a part of her.

The box understood her, it relished her company and she relished its. When they forced her outside, to wander the grounds and watch the squirrels, hoping nostalgia and oxygen might set her asphyxiated mind straight, she would sob and screech and scratch herself until she was returned to the box, its four strong walls. No mountings, no furnishings, nothing but the confinement of space, the playground of her soul.

But one night they violated her sanctified temple. The clinical men. One night they had the audacity to interrupt her anthem. Click Click Cli.. Nothing. They dragged her out from her box. Against the scraping and snapping of nails, the biting, carnivorous and wild, would not stop them either. Kicking and screaming, Wallow was taken away, the red of her blood staining the whitewashed walls.

Before she had felt so strong, so secure, yet she knew that the box giveth, so the box may taketh away. It minions were relentless and colossal, pinning her into the chair. Screams, chants, curses – nothing deterred them. Wallow did not stop howling until the needle was lodged between her eye and into the recesses of her mind, allowing her the sweet release of lobotomised dreaming.

She can no longer find her way back to the box. The corridors get longer, the light source dims until she wanders putting faith that this place would not place something in front of her, it would not hurt her. Creeping through the endless labyrinth, she drags her nails all the way, scratching the plaster from the walls, a twisted trail of breadcrumbs.

Wallow was wrong. The box was not her protector but her captor, her puppet master. Long after the asylum was shut, long after the streams of young nurses began to move into the box to study the profession of the clinical minions, bringing with them the innocence of youth, the blessing of a healthy mind, Wallow continued to wander. Forever searching again for the safety of her confinement – her playground – leaving nail scratches, much to the confusion of the nurses, all the way.

Click Click Click THUD. Eternal and omnipresent, the beat beats on.

 

Cynicisms of a Fresher

Throughout all of my adolescent life I have heard the tall and fantastical tales of freshers. The crazy parties, the monumental nights out, the stories of experience and pleasure shown not only through the words of the person telling the tale, but through the nostalgic look that takes a hold of their face when pressed for information. The anecdotes of alcohol induced amnesia, the frivolous flings and multitude of mysterious strangers who, after a week of getting shitfaced together, become your friends for life. These were the tales I was told; the expectations I had when I arrived at uni and yet my experiences were something altogether…different. Now I’m not saying I didn’t enjoy the week, or that I avoided heavy drinking and socialising; I went out for 7 days, ate little, drunk lots and overall did everything that is expected of a child coming into adulthood – the brunt definition of a fresher. But the feeling I was left with afterwards was not that warm glow of memory, it was not the feeling that that week had changed me as a person in some irrevocable way, and improved me in some form or another. No, instead there was a grand feeling of nothingness. A void, not melancholy nor sad, but equally not warm and nostalgic – fresher’s week appeared as any other week.

 The truth of fresher’s is that you meet a lot of faces, talk to a lot of people from a lot of different places and begin to feel like you’re some kind of prom king from an American film, a popular person who knows and is known by everybody. But you’re not; for every 15 people you talk to you will be lucky to form one lasting friend, and this friend will in all likelihood not be someone who is as close as the friends you had at home. The truth of fresher’s is that these crazy stories that are created are the majority of the time born out of over-exaggerations and the anecdotes of other people. The main benefit of Freshers, and the main friends that you will make, are those of your flat and the floor of your halls. These are the people that you will most likely grow close too, not the hundreds of people in other halls and in the clubs, but the people you first meet. This is the only benefit of fresher’s, the rest of the drunken stories are either hyperbolic, or idiotic.

Now this may sound like the rambling of some 21^st century hermit, living in seclusion from the world. You may also think this is written by somebody who isn’t social and who doesn’t enjoy clubbing, and to a certain extent you would be right to think so. I go clubbing frequently, yet I would not class myself as somebody who ‘enjoys clubbing,’ and I have plenty of friends, but I am by no stretch of the imagination a socialite. I am merely putting forward my opinion on fresher’s week on the whole. It’s fun, and people undoubtedly make memories and friends by participating, but in 30 years’ time when I reach my mid-life crisis and send my mind back through the mists of nostalgia, will I see fresher’s? I think the answer to that question is abundantly clear.

Now I’m not trying to persuade any upcoming undergraduates that it’s terrible and you won’t enjoy it, on the contrary most people, myself included, thoroughly enjoy it. But it is not fundamental, you will not cherish the memory; you will most likely never forget the events, but you will not cherish them. They will be anecdotal, the same drunken stories that I myself heard and consequently built up fresher’s to be this utopian week – this ‘utopian’ week – and therefore the cycle will be repeated. Despite this, I shall not hold onto the feelings of Freshers as an epitome of my youth. What I will hold onto are the feelings of fulfilment of my adolescence; the private rooms in my head where the most precious memories rest, more valuable than any materialistic venture, more valuable than love and hate and companionship – my gold.

Freshers is unique. Filled with the mystery of new people and the possibility of new futures, yet all of this appears to be a masquerade of vanity and false niceties, with the true friends you make boiling down to those you would have made whether you threw up in their kitchen sink or not.