If home is where the heart is I guess my heart is a slut ... or just angsty
The title is obviously a joke, I hate misogyny, I'm a feminist. Aren't you?
This was written a while ago. I’m not sure why I didn’t share it before. Now that I have moved, a lot of this is still relatable. I feel like my reflective posts always end up being convoluted. So sorry about that. I hope you enjoy regardless :)
Home. What a loaded word when it should be so easy to understand. In simple terms, my home would be Bristol. It’s where I grew up, it’s where I know best. It’s also a place that I don’t particularly like, even when I lived there. Especially when I lived there. I’ve been called dramatic for likening it to purgatory but it really did feel like a waiting space. Not much happened for me there, everything felt the same. The thing that I understand the most about Lady Bird is that Christine spent most of her life waiting to leave Sacramento. I felt like this about Bristol.
It’s a bit of a running joke that I’ve moved to university just to collect Bristolians. Sometimes I wonder if to other people, it seems like I love the city because I tend to talk about it a lot. I’m always surprised and excited when I meet people from Bristol, there is a sense of camaraderie or cosmic connection that we share. You can see why people say I’m dramatic. I think I’m surprised because Bristol seems like such a small place, it definetly operates as a village where everyone knows each other somehow. Although I guess for most other people, it’s a big city in the UK and so it makes sense that there are a lot of people that come from there.
In general people love the city. People who grew up there and people who have visited. Now I’m moving back, well soon I will be moving back I’m thinking a lot about what the city means to me and what I hope to make of it in the next year.
There are just a few things that have been floating around in my mind. Firstly I still view Bristol through the lens of 17-year old Ami, which I probably shouldn’t. There will be more for me to do and immerse myself in now that I’m an adult. I’ll be working full time, I’ll find a third space and meet new people there.
I think part of me assumed that moving home meant some sort of regressive school reunion. That’s not to say I’d totally hate a school reunion, I don’t think I’d mind it actually. It’s just that I feel like I’ve changed a lot in the past three years and I’m afraid that moving home would damage that change in some way. Either I slip into the person I used to be, or worse, people who knew that version of myself would continue to perceive me based on who I was then. They’re not completely at fault for that either, they knew me that way and it would take time and a curated space for them to re-meet me as I am now. Although it’s very plausible that I might not come into contact with any of these people at all meaning that the issue is non existent.
This is something else that I have been thinking about. I will be returning to Bristol knowing less people than when I left it. That’s kind of crazy to me, it’s not because I’ve fallen out with all of my childhood friends. It just so happens that a bunch of people are still in university and I suppose others won’t necessarily be moving back. Which I guess got me thinking about the people I once upon a time did know. I’d like to share a story about one of them, let’s call him Moses.
Moses and I went to secondary school and sixth form together, so 7 years in total. Not once do I remember us talking to each other, which was weird because our year group had around 120 students. We also had mutual friends at different points but we never attended the same social events. We were never in any of the same classes either. Although there was a point where we could have taken the same bus to school but he often walked. I know this because my bus always passed him as he was walking. I didn’t know much about him other than he seemed to have a lot of friends but I wouldn’t have called him popular. I feel that ‘popular’ in secondary school has a lot of negative connotations and I have mostly used it as an insult. Moses seemed nice, perhaps a little reserved but as far as I knew, people had only positive things to say about him.
I knew which uni he went to. This is because I realised he went to uni with a good friend of his from school, who back in the day I used to be friends with as well. I guess at some point I stalked them both when I was bored. Anyway our universities are one road apart from each other but because we’re in London, I never worried about bumping into them.
Fast forward to our second year of university, I’m walking towards Brunswick on my way home and Moses comes out of the Tesco, sees me and stops. Now, I was walking with someone and I didn’t really recognise him because he looked different. However, I could see that whoever this person was knew me so I stopped as well. I finally recognised him under his long hair and new beard, I hugged him as a way of greeting each other. In hindsight, it was weird to hug him but also how else do you greet a person you went to school with for 7 years, that you never spoke to, but for whatever reason has decided to stop you in the street instead of walking on and pretending like they didn’t know you, which is what you would’ve done? Exactly, you would also go in for the hug I suspect. It didn’t feel awkward in the moment, thank God. He reciprocated it which was somehow weirder because it made it seem like we knew each other well. How bizarre, how bizarre.
He was way taller than I remember him being in sixth form. Odd, hadn’t he stopped growing by then? We had a really lovely conversation actually, I was glad that we spoke. He also said he had guessed which uni I went to. How funny, just when I thought I was the only one who stalks for fun.
It’s people like Moses that make me wonder if being in Bristol will make us reconnect. Will we bump into each other again? There’s just a lot of people that I reckon if we were to re-meet, we’d really get along. That doesn’t mean that I’m gagging to re-meet you it’s more that my brain wants to say ‘meet me now because I’m better than I was before’. Maybe that’s really weird, I’ll accept it if it is. I guess potentially what I’m trying to say in a very longwinded way is that there are a few people I'd be open to reconnecting with if the opportunity presented itself.
I probably wouldn’t feel this way if I thought I had a strong community in Bristol. Why are so many of you leaving? I often think about the fact that there are so many people we would be good friends with that we don’t know. It’s a fact that I really struggle to comprehend. Only recently have I realised that there are so many people that we do know, and would be good friends with but for whatever reason that hasn’t happened. I guess I’m just nosy and I wonder what all of these people are like now, so many years on. I wonder if they wonder about me as well.