A few days ago I told a friend I planned on applying for New Zealand under 30s working visa at the start of next year and, vaccine dependent, hopefully be able to take advantage for a few months before my 30th birthday in may 2022. But having just started moving around the corner into a new house, I’ve already decided not to do that anymore. I can’t face packing everything into a suitcase, taking the 36 hour flight, moving into a new house, making new friends, navigating new relationships and all the while missing my friends and all their reconciliations back here and feeling terrified they’ll forget me. And then leaving it all behind again and loving people for the rest of my life who I might never touch. I have friends all over the world and it’s wonderful and so crushingly alone, and can make me feel incredibly unloved and unwanted even though that can’t possibly be true, but simply because they are always so far away and their lives look so beautiful through a screen even though I know they feel the same.
I’ve lived between 4 different cities in the last ten years and they’ve all been interesting and exhausting and I miss them all with a deep breathless longing.
From Prague I miss the sun on the Vltava, drinking by the river with live music and dancing all along. I miss sculptures and trams and the subway. I miss the pastel colours and high rise flats. I miss house parties and flat crawls, predrinks and friends I could cuddle with and we’d call it the ratpile. I miss getting high. I miss people asking me about polyamory without a hint of judgement. I miss a group of people who were never the people anyone would normally expect me to know but every single one of whom had my respect. People who were smart and sharp and witty and funny and for 6 months we were all best friends.
From Glasgow I miss gigs, I miss spending night after night with poets, singers, musicians, writers, artists, dancers, rappers. I miss drinking in the café an smoking outside Mchuils and jumping on a bike to cycle in the rain to a house party in the west end where 20 of us would be til 5 am setting the world to rights. I miss going to mad raves and cycling to the afterparty in Ibrox. I miss stereo. I miss Sleazys. I miss lemon tree and banana leaf and that Chinese place across the road from Kelvingrove subway. I miss Mono and feeling begrudging its expense but still paying up because I like the vibe and damn is that seitan burger incredible. I miss MY parties and I miss being told how much everyone loved my parties. I miss kissing my friends.
From York, I really do miss my friends more than the city. An eclectic group of utter brilliant wierdos, smart, kind, deeply non judgemental. I see them once a year and every time it’s like I was never gone. With them I feel truly, honestly, unconditionally loved.
From Edinburgh (because I’m not in Edinburgh now, not really) I miss going out every night and gigging or watching my friends gig and smash it. I miss nice restaurants and art galleries and museums. In some ways though I feel like my friends and I in Edinburgh are only just getting to know each other. We’re not gigging, we’re not chasing the dream through comedy clubs. Suddenly we need to talk to each other.
It’s so odd to live in a globalised world, where everyone is a touch of a button away and yet a million miles. So I won’t do it anymore, even though on the surface it’s grand and exciting and full of new experiences and new loves and passions. I need a nest. I need a home.
I once wrote 4 years ago that grief is a tax that you pay on love, because anything that you love you will grieve one day. But when you keep placing yourself in a position of separation from the things which make breathing possible then you place yourself in a constant state of breathlessness, emptiness, longing. Like sylvia plath watching every fig on the tree slowly rot away. And all I want is to be loved and all I know is that it’s easier to be loved when you are your own whole person and both these things seem so desperately at odds with each other.
I don’t text my mum enough and I already feel guilty and sorry for her because if I’m struggling with loneliness then she definitely is, and I wish I could be better. But that’s another blog.
I wish I focussed more on singing and writing, which I’m naturally good at. I wish I could express this all in a way people would remember.
A Place to Get Lost 