Ella Wiltshire poignantly reflects on the disorientation of returning home from uni and that strange feeling of being in between the past and the present.

That village is a painting to me now. It is unchanging and unmoving in my mind. Before, it was flowing and alive, parallel to me as I grew up, laying the tracks of my life in front of me before I stepped onto them and lived them for myself. Now, upon going home, the streets are still. I can move in and out of that painting as I please, but it does not repaint itself to accommodate me or the person that I’ve become.  

I find it really strange walking in that village alone at night without the sounds of my city surrounding me. The last time I was home, I walked across the village to my friend’s house, and I swear the whole neighbourhood could hear my footsteps. But to me, my university city is alive. The whole place steps forward – it is this moving, ever-present connection of people, overflowing with complicated life. It represents the person that I am now, with all my ambitions and aspirations and everything that will become of me in the future. It is real and tangible and interesting and new.  

It has coffee shops and brunch places I want to try out and clubs I never go to and libraries full of people like and unlike me. It has card games in the pub with my best friends and chatting in the hallway before bed. Maybe all this vitality is why I find it so difficult to leave the city during holidays.    

So going back home is like moving through a painting. It feels like each place I go in that small village, I’m treading on a memory. If I walk to the shop and back, I am walking with every version of myself and every version of my friends that I’ve walked there with. Layers of wallpaper in my house have watched me grow up; they have seen the furniture arranged and rearranged. The excitement of new love still hangs in the air of my bedroom from the summer I spent with my first boyfriend.  

Memories of that relationship linger in every corner of the village. I could swear that each leaf on the bush outside his house remembers every time we passed it together. Sometimes I think I could have saved myself some trouble had we never gone anywhere together. I think it is the stasis of the whole place that makes leaving my university city feel like more than a small move across geographies – instead it is a seismic travel through time and an involuntary regression.  

It is funny because I don’t miss him or mourn the person I was when we were together. I am sure of the person that I am now. There is no aspect of myself that would be improved through the connection to a man that is, in reality, a complete stranger to me now. He knew me so intimately, but now he hangs in trees and sits in tarmac, mapping the landscape of a site that no longer represents me.  

Perhaps that is where I lose my judgement, when I mistake places for missed opportunities. Summer transpires and all of a sudden I’m searching for something that I don’t want back. The relationship ran its course; it completed itself and served its purpose, as my village did when it was the supporting backdrop of my formative years. It was there for me on every first day of school, every party attended, every silly thing cried over. Yet I know that is not who I am anymore, and even though sometimes it feels regressive and stagnant, I know it’s just growing pains. It is just me trying to fit a square into a circle, because I am older now, I have grown corners.