Lily is an undergraduate student in English at King’s. She is particularly interested in prose literature that explores new beginnings. Through this work, she hopes to capture the universal experience of leaving home and the uncertainty that this can bring.
When I first moved to London, I got a haircut. One of those ones with a name. That way, I would be the person with the ‘this-named-haircut’. I liked my hair because I looked familiar, like an image I’d seen before, reminded in the moment of the exact place and the exact time. Before, I looked too much like myself. This time, I could walk down the street and know, even for a short while, exactly who I was.
As the nights get longer and the mornings get shorter, I feel less of the day is my own. Today, I will leave behind the comforting monotony of my desk to get a coffee. I’ll go to one of those coffee chains with the bright lights and the over-enthusiastic staff. They will act like they haven’t just worked a six hour shift that mostly consisted of cleaning up other people’s used mugs. Somewhere I am familiar with, for fear of getting it wrong. Sometimes I think that everyone received a book on how to live their lives when they were younger and that mine got lost in the post. Sometimes I wish I could be old, 80 or something, and to have lived my life. To look back with regret at a life misspent but to know I don’t have to go through the agony of living it again. It’s raining and I don’t have a raincoat with me here. Isn’t it strange how the rain falls more slowly in the streetlight? Like it doesn’t wish to fall any further. It’s done it once and now it must do it again and again, for the rest of time.
I grew up in a place where there are no streetlights. There just aren’t enough people to justify the expense. I would like to know if there is a definitive number of people to justify the construction of a streetlight in an area. Sometimes I like to imagine there’s a man in a suit somewhere counting the residents of a town miles away from the comforting heat of his city office – comparing it to the calculated cost of installing a streetlight. He’ll use a physical calculator that he keeps in the top drawer of his desk and he’ll write the sums out on a little notepad that’s seen better days before typing the sums into a computer. Later, he will submit his findings to be reviewed by someone who has been there longer than he has. His spreadsheet will conclude that 199 is too few people to justify the expense but that 200 is just right, like some inhuman corporate game of Goldilocks. When I was at home, I would go out and hate the thought of seeing someone I knew. When I go out now, I know I never will. There will be nobody within the whole five minute journey that I will recognise. There will be nobody, in fact, that I will ever see again. They will go on living their lives just as I will go on living mine, and they won’t remember the brief window in which our lives crossed. Perhaps they will cross again some five years later – in a different place, a different time. Neither of us will notice or remember our first encounter.
I think that that’s the most important thing – not where I go, what will happen or even what I do – it’s what I remember. What I notice. What to do with a lifetime? What do I choose to take note of, to carry with me for the rest of my life? If it’s not this face, it will be this one. If it’s not this book, it will be that one. If it’s not this memory, then, perhaps, that one.
Sometimes I think that I miss the memories of home more than the place itself. I miss the long summer mornings at liberal churches in the country when I was a child. I miss the days that felt like they would last a lifetime and, in a way, they always will. They will be the place I am constantly returning to, as if I never left. At home, people always say see you later, never goodbye. I miss waking up in a town where the buses never come and the sun stretches on like the yawn of a cat in the mid-morning sun. I miss the space underneath my bed that’s full to the brim with all of the stuff I’ve collected over the years, boxes bursting out, full of old memories and opportunities to create new ones. In my new room there is so much empty space. The opportunity to fill a space, to create a life from nothing.
When people back home ask how London is, I will always mention how it’s so busy and there are so many people. What I really want to say is that I hate how you feel like you’re never alone. I hate how there are hundreds of little supermarkets with nothing in them. I hate how I have to walk ten minutes in the rain to get a bus that will take me to not quite where I want to be. Most of all, I hate how when I look to the sky at night, I see absolutely nothing. Now my hair has grown out, I look in the mirror and I’m faced with the person I least wished to see.
By Lily