Is This It?
Warning: rambly, miserable narrative ahead.
Can’t you see I’m trying, I don’t even like it, I’d just like to get to your apartment,
Now I’m staying here just for a while, I can’t think ‘cause I’m just way too tired.
Is this it? Is this it? Is this... it?
Uni year 1 is over. Finis. I return to my hometown on Monday for the best part of four months emotionally depleted, exhausted and disillusioned with the entire university experience, which has been less partying until my proverbial bollocks drop off and more being fucked over by boys who needed a rebound. Or rather, ‘a boy’ who needed a rebound. I’ve also come to despise hanging around with my ‘friendship group’ for some unknown reason and have been homesick all year, for friends, family and just being at home. Some of my friends think of uni as being ‘home’ now. I will never think of uni as home. Over the past nine months, mostly as a result of my disastrous fling, this place has become ‘anti-home’. Truro and anywhere north of that in Cornwall is fine. In fact, any part of Cornwall is probably fine apart from Penryn and Falmouth which, despite being quaintly ok, fill me with bile from the memories I have of the places; I remember very few good ones, despite knowing that there have been some. I’ve forgiven the boy involved - mostly - but I can’t shake my loathing of the place. What went wrong?
I arrived in September, optimistic about everything, awaiting nights of carnage and hilarity. Well, I was wrong about that. The first night of Fresher’s was ok, despite being on medication preventing any large-scale drinking - not that I’m a drinker, really - and I looked forward to the rest of the week’s events. Except I came down with Fresher’s Flu during the week and spent most of the week snuffling in bed watching ‘Election’ instead of partying the night away, though not until I’d been on a pub crawl during which I became unaccountably existentialist and stormed off by myself, wandering through Falmouth for the first time at 11pm in the pitch black, unsure of where the bus stops were. Fortunately, I stumbled across a station and got the train back; ‘stumbled’ in a sober manner, still owing to the medication situation. However, after one angsty phonecall home on the evening of my 1-week anniversary, things changed. I went on an English Society walk from the campus to Falmouth, and just happened to wind up talking to the rather attractive boy I’d had my eye on during the week. And, as it happened, he was nice, had a good sense of humour and an even better taste in music. Plus, conveniently, he was from my home county; the other side, admittedly, but Kent nonetheless. We spent four hours talking about nothing and everything, going into a CD store and expressing our mutual love for Weezer and Hole, and discussing our life stories. He mentioned an ex-girlfriend who had cheated on him a few weeks before coming to uni - they’d agreed to split up beforehand in any case, but he was clearly still a bit shaken by it. However, he was the first person I’d met during the week that I felt I’d actually ‘clicked’ with, and as a result I developed a little crush on him.
During the first week of lectures, I didn’t have the opportunity to speak to him. He’d waved at me during one, which made me slightly giddy that he remembered me, but aside from that... It wasn’t until I turned up at the Fresher’s Ball with my housemates that I sought him out again, taking my favourite flatmate Thea with me to seek him. Alas, during our one hour search we were unable to find him, and conceded defeat, thus returning to our flatmates. By some astonishing coincidence, they were stood near the stage where a ska band were performing... and a certain dark, floppy-haired male was right next to them. After some indecisive, nervy flapping, Thea took matters into her own hands and tapped him on the shoulder before disappearing, making it look like I’d done it. But he turned round and, as the gig was finishing at that point anyway, we ended up hanging out for four and a half hours, ending up on a grassy verge between our flats, discussing life et cetera and talking to amusing drunkards. I pretty much fell head-over-heels for him at this point, and he’d offered to accompany me to watch some non-league football at some point - always a good way to win me over. After that, it was all plain sailing.
He magically appeared as I was on my way to the Creative Writing group, on his way to return a CD I’d recommended, and I casually mentioned that Truro’s football team were playing on that Saturday, and did he want to come? He did indeed. That Saturday afternoon was the high point of my year; we had a great time, and I laughed until my sides hurt. He seemed to find me funny, and I began to wonder if he reciprocated. The next evening, wanting to escape his flatmates, we hung out again and ended up stargazing in the middle of a road (an empty one) and then in a courtyard near the accommodation, and singing Smiths songs together. It could have come out of an indie movie, but it was all real. At least, I think it was. After much more hanging out over the next week and a half, both before/in/after lectures and outside the classroom, the Thursday of the fourth week rolled around. Seven months ago today, I’ve just realised. We were both online and I’d run out of apple juice, the drink that we had an in-joke about. So when I mentioned my lack of apple juice, he invited me round.
That was around 10pm. At 2.30am, after lots of YouTube-watching, talking and music, I found myself cuddled up to him, just knowing that something would happen. Although it took a minor existential crisis from him - during which we both professed our attraction, though he was still wary of involvements given his recent heartbreak - it did; nothing graphic, just lots of kissing. There was a romantic soundtrack (The Magnetic Fields’ wonderful EP ‘The House of Tomorrow’, which I’d discovered hours before) and awkward cheesy sentiments and, best of all to my dubious (although not disastrous) self-esteem levels, compliments regarding both personality and appearance. I had no doubt whatsoever that we would end up being together, especially when a relationship was touted in conversation. Then, at about 4.15, he disappeared into the kitchen; my nausea levels shot up - partly because of the shock of someone I utterly adored being interested in me, partly because of nervousness on that behalf, but possibly also because I had a bad feeling about this - and not without foundation. When I ventured into the kitchen, on the verge of vomiting, he casually explained that he wasn’t ready for a relationship at that moment and was incredibly sorry. Absolutely gutted and almost numb, I told him how disappointed I was, and he hugged me, looking as though he was about to cry. But we remained friends and agreed to maintain our scheduled rendez-vous on the Saturday, to go to a gig and go CD-shopping. It wasn’t too awkward; I avoided prolonged eye contact and any mention of ‘the night before’, and concentrated on the fact that we were still friends, and especially the words ‘at the moment’. We’d be together before Christmas, I reckoned. The kisses hadn’t dried up. Right on one count, wrong on another.
A truly shitty Tuesday followed. A horrible bunch of lectures and seminars was succeeded by a hideous/stupid walk back from Asda during which I crippled my fingers with the bags (the welts were there for hours) and received a phone call from my dad informing me that our remaining gerbil had died. I was a state, I hated everyone/thing and the only person on campus I wanted to talk to was the one I was pretty much in love with. So I contacted him, and went to his flat, where we hung out. I avoided eye contact as before, he comforted me, and then as he was looking at his Facebook saw pictures of his ex-girlfriend, upsetting him. He asked for a hug. I gave him a half-hearted pat on the back. He asked for a ‘proper hug’. I gave in. And as I pulled away, he kissed me again... told me he ‘really want[ed] to be with’ me... that he ‘really like[d]’ me... and this just convinced me that he really did want to be with me. More kissing. He also asked me if I wanted to “do anything else”, though fortunately I’d been scarred by that side of things in my previous relationship and turned down the offer. As I was leaving, he told me that he was clingy, to which I said that I didn’t mind. I wanted him to cling to me. That was it. Our two-‘date’ tryst.
Fast forward a month and a half; he was treating me like shit. It was as if none of the stuff had ever happened. I presumed he’d gone off me, for which I mentally self-flagellated like crazy and occasionally went a little bit psycho by myself (hurling my copy of Hamlet like a discus and with the force of an Olympian discus-thrower, leaving a black mark on the wall, being the best example of this), but never managed to focus on my course. I’ve managed 2:1s all year (though I doubt I did in my exams), but never put the effort in around this time. I was too busy moping that I’d been so near, yet so far. Yet I never stood up to his misery and emotional bullying, because I knew that he had issues - which he still hasn’t told me, though I know what at least some of them are “ and was easily lured into self-torturing. It was like the opening verse from ‘Ever Fallen In Love?’ by The Buzzcocks: “You spurn my natural emotion/You make me feel like dirt/And I’m hurt./But if I start a commotion/I run the risk of losing you/And that’s worse...”. However, to alleviate my woes, we’d wound up in the same friendship group with four others; one of whom I feared had an interest in the guy I liked, but was assured she had no such intentions by one of the others. And, to further lighten my mood, he apologised for his behaviour when I saw him for the last time before he went home for Christmas, and gave me such a tender hug - as well as a kiss on the head - that I assumed the only reason he hadn’t properly kissed me was because his flatmate was being a nuisance and making laddish remarks involving our hug. My hope was renewed. He did like me still, I was sure of it!
Christmas passed by with me sitting on my laptop and ignoring my family pretty much the whole time, waiting for him to come online so I could talk to him. I was impatient to return so I could finally start the term when we’d get together, spurred on by the discovery that my ex-boyfriend, something of a social leper, had been getting down and dirty with his new girlfriend - who he kept a secret from me until they broke up, though I’d known about it for ages by that point. I left home again with a sense of hope that was soon to be crushed. At the end of January he told me that he “didn’t know what [he]’d been doing” during ‘our’ week. That “we wouldn’t have worked”. That, most cruelly of all, I wasn’t his “type”. Absolutely devastated, I went to my newly-taken friend’s flat and - instead of working on the presentation we had due in in a few days - cried for about an hour. But we ordered pizza and other junk food in, invited the other girl from our group along, bounced around to empowering post-break-up songs together and watched Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Oh, how ironic that we invited Molly.
Again, I remained friends with the guy. Why not? It would’ve been churlish to begrudge him if he’d fallen out of lust with me. Except that Saturday, just a few hours after we’d spent the day together in Truro buying CDs, he hooked up with Molly at a party they were at. I’d seen it coming; I knew they were interested in each other following a pub trip during which I became so claustrophobic that I briefly left and ran, in the freezing February air, down to the docks without a coat on. Sunday morning... a mutual friend told me. I spent the next two months furious, numb, depressed and, above all, seriously homesick. Despite forgiving Molly fairly quickly, to reasons even I can’t ascertain apart from her being very entertaining and not a malicious character, I couldn’t do the same for him. He’d treated me like shit, he’d used me and, worst of all, now he’d been rewarded for his efforts. Fuck karma.
The low point came a week later when I went AWOL to take myself to Perranporth, the town I’d spent most of my holidays in, and bawled for hours. Crying became a routine in February and March, as I’d often find myself unable to sleep through remembering both my times with him and their times and then release it through a good old weep, but this was something else. There was half an hour of stifled sobbing on the bus, and then another half-hour on the cliff overlooking the beach... mid-howl I called my dad, wailed about how I missed home, and he told me I could come back for a weekend. That was my clarion call to work tirelessly for several weeks before a blissful weekend back at the beginning of March. Walking over the bridge at my hometown station was another weepfest, and - as I wailed to my mother - “I’ve never been so glad to see horrible, shitty Paddock Wood in my life!”. From that weekend onwards, Paddock Wood re-established itself in my estimations, not through any particular glory of its own aside from my family, but through not being uni. And I’d been through shit in years 7 and 11, but home is home. The other place was somewhere where I’d been screwed over, my friends had stopped functioning as a group and now our social interactions were awkward due to the dynamics (two couples, two singletons), and I didn’t really have any alternative groups apart from my lovely housemate. My relationship with my family since last term has improved exponentially, to the point where I can’t cope emotionally without them. The other benefits of home are in my friends, who are so much better suited to me than the ones I’ve made at uni, and my beloved football team. Truro aren’t quite the same - indeed, Tonbridge Angels will be playing them next season as both teams were promoted into the same league. But I digress. Returning to uni resulted in another tear-fest.
My closest friend from our ‘group’ had also begun to drift away, although without realising it, due to her incredibly intense relationship with someone else in the group. They rarely extricate themselves from each other, and when they do, they talk about little else. So I felt as though she wasn’t there for me as much as she could have been, and when she was she got angry at me for hating Cornwall. Just because she loves the place. And she would, because she has someone to share it with... The rest of the term was a mass of essays I found impossible to write through lack of attention span and the frequent insomnia that plagued me still. I got 2:1s again, but the fact that I was so close to a First in one of them is annoying because it was this lack of sleep that hampered my efforts. And Easter reinforced how much I adore being at home and spending the evenings watching TV with my parents.
Not really anything else to narrate. The guy has started being nice to me, finally, though his version of events is different to mine. I could do without the references to their sex life, but aside from that... I just need a new group of friends next year that don’t patronise me, act condescending or, of course, break my heart/betray me by getting with the guy I fancy. I need to become stronger as a result of this year and less emotionally vulnerable. I just don’t know how I’m going to do that, yet. But I’m going to spend next to no time in Cornwall unless absolutely necessary, and I’m going to enjoy the summer. Fuck knows, it’s been too long since I really enjoyed myself.
Can’t you see I’m trying, I don’t even like it, I’d just like to get to your apartment,
Now I’m staying here just for a while, I can’t think ‘cause I’m just way too tired.
Is this it? Is this it? Is this... it?
Uni year 1 is over. Finis. I return to my hometown on Monday for the best part of four months emotionally depleted, exhausted and disillusioned with the entire university experience, which has been less partying until my proverbial bollocks drop off and more being fucked over by boys who needed a rebound. Or rather, ‘a boy’ who needed a rebound. I’ve also come to despise hanging around with my ‘friendship group’ for some unknown reason and have been homesick all year, for friends, family and just being at home. Some of my friends think of uni as being ‘home’ now. I will never think of uni as home. Over the past nine months, mostly as a result of my disastrous fling, this place has become ‘anti-home’. Truro and anywhere north of that in Cornwall is fine. In fact, any part of Cornwall is probably fine apart from Penryn and Falmouth which, despite being quaintly ok, fill me with bile from the memories I have of the places; I remember very few good ones, despite knowing that there have been some. I’ve forgiven the boy involved - mostly - but I can’t shake my loathing of the place. What went wrong?
I arrived in September, optimistic about everything, awaiting nights of carnage and hilarity. Well, I was wrong about that. The first night of Fresher’s was ok, despite being on medication preventing any large-scale drinking - not that I’m a drinker, really - and I looked forward to the rest of the week’s events. Except I came down with Fresher’s Flu during the week and spent most of the week snuffling in bed watching ‘Election’ instead of partying the night away, though not until I’d been on a pub crawl during which I became unaccountably existentialist and stormed off by myself, wandering through Falmouth for the first time at 11pm in the pitch black, unsure of where the bus stops were. Fortunately, I stumbled across a station and got the train back; ‘stumbled’ in a sober manner, still owing to the medication situation. However, after one angsty phonecall home on the evening of my 1-week anniversary, things changed. I went on an English Society walk from the campus to Falmouth, and just happened to wind up talking to the rather attractive boy I’d had my eye on during the week. And, as it happened, he was nice, had a good sense of humour and an even better taste in music. Plus, conveniently, he was from my home county; the other side, admittedly, but Kent nonetheless. We spent four hours talking about nothing and everything, going into a CD store and expressing our mutual love for Weezer and Hole, and discussing our life stories. He mentioned an ex-girlfriend who had cheated on him a few weeks before coming to uni - they’d agreed to split up beforehand in any case, but he was clearly still a bit shaken by it. However, he was the first person I’d met during the week that I felt I’d actually ‘clicked’ with, and as a result I developed a little crush on him.
During the first week of lectures, I didn’t have the opportunity to speak to him. He’d waved at me during one, which made me slightly giddy that he remembered me, but aside from that... It wasn’t until I turned up at the Fresher’s Ball with my housemates that I sought him out again, taking my favourite flatmate Thea with me to seek him. Alas, during our one hour search we were unable to find him, and conceded defeat, thus returning to our flatmates. By some astonishing coincidence, they were stood near the stage where a ska band were performing... and a certain dark, floppy-haired male was right next to them. After some indecisive, nervy flapping, Thea took matters into her own hands and tapped him on the shoulder before disappearing, making it look like I’d done it. But he turned round and, as the gig was finishing at that point anyway, we ended up hanging out for four and a half hours, ending up on a grassy verge between our flats, discussing life et cetera and talking to amusing drunkards. I pretty much fell head-over-heels for him at this point, and he’d offered to accompany me to watch some non-league football at some point - always a good way to win me over. After that, it was all plain sailing.
He magically appeared as I was on my way to the Creative Writing group, on his way to return a CD I’d recommended, and I casually mentioned that Truro’s football team were playing on that Saturday, and did he want to come? He did indeed. That Saturday afternoon was the high point of my year; we had a great time, and I laughed until my sides hurt. He seemed to find me funny, and I began to wonder if he reciprocated. The next evening, wanting to escape his flatmates, we hung out again and ended up stargazing in the middle of a road (an empty one) and then in a courtyard near the accommodation, and singing Smiths songs together. It could have come out of an indie movie, but it was all real. At least, I think it was. After much more hanging out over the next week and a half, both before/in/after lectures and outside the classroom, the Thursday of the fourth week rolled around. Seven months ago today, I’ve just realised. We were both online and I’d run out of apple juice, the drink that we had an in-joke about. So when I mentioned my lack of apple juice, he invited me round.
That was around 10pm. At 2.30am, after lots of YouTube-watching, talking and music, I found myself cuddled up to him, just knowing that something would happen. Although it took a minor existential crisis from him - during which we both professed our attraction, though he was still wary of involvements given his recent heartbreak - it did; nothing graphic, just lots of kissing. There was a romantic soundtrack (The Magnetic Fields’ wonderful EP ‘The House of Tomorrow’, which I’d discovered hours before) and awkward cheesy sentiments and, best of all to my dubious (although not disastrous) self-esteem levels, compliments regarding both personality and appearance. I had no doubt whatsoever that we would end up being together, especially when a relationship was touted in conversation. Then, at about 4.15, he disappeared into the kitchen; my nausea levels shot up - partly because of the shock of someone I utterly adored being interested in me, partly because of nervousness on that behalf, but possibly also because I had a bad feeling about this - and not without foundation. When I ventured into the kitchen, on the verge of vomiting, he casually explained that he wasn’t ready for a relationship at that moment and was incredibly sorry. Absolutely gutted and almost numb, I told him how disappointed I was, and he hugged me, looking as though he was about to cry. But we remained friends and agreed to maintain our scheduled rendez-vous on the Saturday, to go to a gig and go CD-shopping. It wasn’t too awkward; I avoided prolonged eye contact and any mention of ‘the night before’, and concentrated on the fact that we were still friends, and especially the words ‘at the moment’. We’d be together before Christmas, I reckoned. The kisses hadn’t dried up. Right on one count, wrong on another.
A truly shitty Tuesday followed. A horrible bunch of lectures and seminars was succeeded by a hideous/stupid walk back from Asda during which I crippled my fingers with the bags (the welts were there for hours) and received a phone call from my dad informing me that our remaining gerbil had died. I was a state, I hated everyone/thing and the only person on campus I wanted to talk to was the one I was pretty much in love with. So I contacted him, and went to his flat, where we hung out. I avoided eye contact as before, he comforted me, and then as he was looking at his Facebook saw pictures of his ex-girlfriend, upsetting him. He asked for a hug. I gave him a half-hearted pat on the back. He asked for a ‘proper hug’. I gave in. And as I pulled away, he kissed me again... told me he ‘really want[ed] to be with’ me... that he ‘really like[d]’ me... and this just convinced me that he really did want to be with me. More kissing. He also asked me if I wanted to “do anything else”, though fortunately I’d been scarred by that side of things in my previous relationship and turned down the offer. As I was leaving, he told me that he was clingy, to which I said that I didn’t mind. I wanted him to cling to me. That was it. Our two-‘date’ tryst.
Fast forward a month and a half; he was treating me like shit. It was as if none of the stuff had ever happened. I presumed he’d gone off me, for which I mentally self-flagellated like crazy and occasionally went a little bit psycho by myself (hurling my copy of Hamlet like a discus and with the force of an Olympian discus-thrower, leaving a black mark on the wall, being the best example of this), but never managed to focus on my course. I’ve managed 2:1s all year (though I doubt I did in my exams), but never put the effort in around this time. I was too busy moping that I’d been so near, yet so far. Yet I never stood up to his misery and emotional bullying, because I knew that he had issues - which he still hasn’t told me, though I know what at least some of them are “ and was easily lured into self-torturing. It was like the opening verse from ‘Ever Fallen In Love?’ by The Buzzcocks: “You spurn my natural emotion/You make me feel like dirt/And I’m hurt./But if I start a commotion/I run the risk of losing you/And that’s worse...”. However, to alleviate my woes, we’d wound up in the same friendship group with four others; one of whom I feared had an interest in the guy I liked, but was assured she had no such intentions by one of the others. And, to further lighten my mood, he apologised for his behaviour when I saw him for the last time before he went home for Christmas, and gave me such a tender hug - as well as a kiss on the head - that I assumed the only reason he hadn’t properly kissed me was because his flatmate was being a nuisance and making laddish remarks involving our hug. My hope was renewed. He did like me still, I was sure of it!
Christmas passed by with me sitting on my laptop and ignoring my family pretty much the whole time, waiting for him to come online so I could talk to him. I was impatient to return so I could finally start the term when we’d get together, spurred on by the discovery that my ex-boyfriend, something of a social leper, had been getting down and dirty with his new girlfriend - who he kept a secret from me until they broke up, though I’d known about it for ages by that point. I left home again with a sense of hope that was soon to be crushed. At the end of January he told me that he “didn’t know what [he]’d been doing” during ‘our’ week. That “we wouldn’t have worked”. That, most cruelly of all, I wasn’t his “type”. Absolutely devastated, I went to my newly-taken friend’s flat and - instead of working on the presentation we had due in in a few days - cried for about an hour. But we ordered pizza and other junk food in, invited the other girl from our group along, bounced around to empowering post-break-up songs together and watched Scott Pilgrim Vs The World. Oh, how ironic that we invited Molly.
Again, I remained friends with the guy. Why not? It would’ve been churlish to begrudge him if he’d fallen out of lust with me. Except that Saturday, just a few hours after we’d spent the day together in Truro buying CDs, he hooked up with Molly at a party they were at. I’d seen it coming; I knew they were interested in each other following a pub trip during which I became so claustrophobic that I briefly left and ran, in the freezing February air, down to the docks without a coat on. Sunday morning... a mutual friend told me. I spent the next two months furious, numb, depressed and, above all, seriously homesick. Despite forgiving Molly fairly quickly, to reasons even I can’t ascertain apart from her being very entertaining and not a malicious character, I couldn’t do the same for him. He’d treated me like shit, he’d used me and, worst of all, now he’d been rewarded for his efforts. Fuck karma.
The low point came a week later when I went AWOL to take myself to Perranporth, the town I’d spent most of my holidays in, and bawled for hours. Crying became a routine in February and March, as I’d often find myself unable to sleep through remembering both my times with him and their times and then release it through a good old weep, but this was something else. There was half an hour of stifled sobbing on the bus, and then another half-hour on the cliff overlooking the beach... mid-howl I called my dad, wailed about how I missed home, and he told me I could come back for a weekend. That was my clarion call to work tirelessly for several weeks before a blissful weekend back at the beginning of March. Walking over the bridge at my hometown station was another weepfest, and - as I wailed to my mother - “I’ve never been so glad to see horrible, shitty Paddock Wood in my life!”. From that weekend onwards, Paddock Wood re-established itself in my estimations, not through any particular glory of its own aside from my family, but through not being uni. And I’d been through shit in years 7 and 11, but home is home. The other place was somewhere where I’d been screwed over, my friends had stopped functioning as a group and now our social interactions were awkward due to the dynamics (two couples, two singletons), and I didn’t really have any alternative groups apart from my lovely housemate. My relationship with my family since last term has improved exponentially, to the point where I can’t cope emotionally without them. The other benefits of home are in my friends, who are so much better suited to me than the ones I’ve made at uni, and my beloved football team. Truro aren’t quite the same - indeed, Tonbridge Angels will be playing them next season as both teams were promoted into the same league. But I digress. Returning to uni resulted in another tear-fest.
My closest friend from our ‘group’ had also begun to drift away, although without realising it, due to her incredibly intense relationship with someone else in the group. They rarely extricate themselves from each other, and when they do, they talk about little else. So I felt as though she wasn’t there for me as much as she could have been, and when she was she got angry at me for hating Cornwall. Just because she loves the place. And she would, because she has someone to share it with... The rest of the term was a mass of essays I found impossible to write through lack of attention span and the frequent insomnia that plagued me still. I got 2:1s again, but the fact that I was so close to a First in one of them is annoying because it was this lack of sleep that hampered my efforts. And Easter reinforced how much I adore being at home and spending the evenings watching TV with my parents.
Not really anything else to narrate. The guy has started being nice to me, finally, though his version of events is different to mine. I could do without the references to their sex life, but aside from that... I just need a new group of friends next year that don’t patronise me, act condescending or, of course, break my heart/betray me by getting with the guy I fancy. I need to become stronger as a result of this year and less emotionally vulnerable. I just don’t know how I’m going to do that, yet. But I’m going to spend next to no time in Cornwall unless absolutely necessary, and I’m going to enjoy the summer. Fuck knows, it’s been too long since I really enjoyed myself.
