this bed and that bed

I feel distinctly weird tonight.

I got out of my lecture at 6pm last night, the first time I've left that late since the clocks went back, and it was pitch black outside. The drama department at RHUL is on the other side of the A30 from the main campus, accessible by footbridge or by scarpering across the road as fast as your stumpy legs will carry you. I vote footbridge every time.

It's part of the ritual I guess. I could get pretentious about it, but I won't. Actually I will. I like having to go across that footbridge, though I hated it at first. 9am on a Monday morning, any obstacle is a bad obstacle indeed. But now I feel it. It's part of what I do before I get there, part of the journey, something I do. On good days, it really works for me. It feels kind of like getting into the right frame of mind to go and do some work, like, this is the end of being a pisshead, time to be a student. Good days, the footbridge is when I start to psyche myself up, I start to focus. Bad days it's just a fucking hunk of metal between me and where I have to be.

Fridays at 6pm, it's pitch black outside, the footbridge is lit up like a tunnel over the road, headlights streaming underneath, the Founder's building off to the right, Surrey straight ahead and Egham to the left. Fridays I really like that bridge.

This Friday, I switched my phone on crossing the bridge and it all got a bit stressful. I was supposed to be somewhere in ten minutes and somewhere else two hours ago, I'd given someone the wrong time and been given the wrong time by someone else. It all went tits up.

Later, in the pub, I got to chill out a bit. Had a long overdue heart to heart with a mate, spent far too long melting pennies into the ice on the hand-pumps, and then melting them back out again because money's money after all. Decided that I'm not embarassingly young, even when my friends are so stupidly old. That's just how old I am, it's where I am, if they're ahead of me that's their problem. I'm eighteen. Call me nineteen and I'll correct you. Mistake me for someone in their twenties and I won't be flattered because that's not how old I am.

Today my parents went away to the New Forest for the night, so I was left in the house on my own.

I used to love being in the house on my own so much. That was before my brother moved out though, when there were videos to watch, CDs to listen to, food to eat. There's just enough for two in my parents' fridge now, I feel like I'm stealing. My room is stupidly tidy, stupidly empty. I stayed in bed in the morning for ages, feeling strange. I've slept in that room in that house my entire life, that bed's been mine for about 6 years. I've stared up at that same ceiling, a few feet away, for 6 years. I felt really small. But kind of too big. I sat down at the piano and didn't know what to play. Couldn't really think how to start.

That's the problem. People will ask how I am, they'll ask how it's going, and it's all fine. Then they'll say, so really, how's it going. They want something real, they're saying, give me something real, tell me about the experience, tell me what's really going on. What do I say? How the hell do I start?

Went to see Paul in Unwins, discovered that you can buy G&T in a can. Ridiculously cheap. This can't be a good omen.

Waiting for Paul to finish, I walked around Yateley for an hour, headphones in. I did that a lot before I left. Nothing better than just upping and leaving, wandering round in my head. I'd take the long way, the really long way, to get to Tesco. My parents wondered why posting a letter took me half an hour.

The fireworks were like every other Yateley fireworks, cheap and cheerful, made by the company. We talked about plays and acting, oohed and aahed at all the appropriate moments, played with sparklers, went back to Tom's free house.

It was about then that I started to feel blue. Not lonely. Well kind of lonely. Weird. More that there was too many people I cared about in one place, I couldn't handle it. You forget how much you love people until suddenly they're all there, and if you sit quietly enough you can see the picture carrying on without you, and you realise that no one's life will stop when you leave. Least of all yours. I really didn't want to leave Tom's. I wanted to stay the night, sleep on someone's floor, wake up in the morning and wear today's clothes again. I wanted to go to church and hear Taz sing, to linger in the pub with everyone, to just stay.

Now, I'm back in my room. I had a think about it, this room, and how different it is to mine. I close the door in my room at home, switch the light off. Glow in the dark fish. Streetlight from two roads away, shines in through the gap in the houses. It lights up my room. The curtains hang from the broken rail, cover only a corner of the window. My whole room is illuminated. The houses opposite, the sky behind, the light at the bend at the top of the road. My walls, photos on the ceiling, light right by my head. The ladder. This step, that step, ducking my head, falling carefully into bed, the shaking of windchimes. Purple wallpaper with silver swirls. My TV, my door, the wooden bars next to my face, the dent in the mattress. I think of feeling unhappy, but never trapped. It would go like this, each night, and when my head was in the covers and the wood against my face, I'd screw up my face and I would never ever make a sound.

This room. Walk in the door, shut it, lock it. Don't switch the light off til I'm really ready. Totter across the room, pull the curtains open. Cameron halls, lit up for some reason, the purple light of Medicine in the distance, reflections from Runymede lighting up the walls. The green light on my speakers, the orange standby on the computer. The desk chair, I trip over it. The purple rug on the floor. There's not enough home to go round in this room. This bed. I think of feeling sick, the room spinning round me. I think of the u-bend of my toilet, my reflection in the mirror and how pale I always seem to look here. Waking up. Always, always being late. I feel I've been here too long. There's poems on the wall next to my bed, posters and a palm cross above my head. This room is too big for me. I never know how to feel here.

I don't care if anyone hears me. Am I obligated to be happy here? Do I owe that to anyone, that pretence of being happy? Do I fuck. It doesn't matter.

Driving home with Paul. I'm not used to him in the front seat, being responsible. I don't like the way things pan out, I don't like the way I feel shoved to the side but I like him driving, I like that it feels safer. I sit in the back like a little kid being taken home.

Founder's comes looming up like it always does. We'd drive past it every now and then the last few months, I'd trick people and beg them into driving me past it. That beast of a building. Now I'm here. I don't feel like I'm here.

But I don't feel like I'm anywhere else.

The Importance of Elsewhere
Philip Larkin
Lonely in Ireland, since it was not home,
Strangeness made sense. The salt rebuff of speech,
Insisting so on difference, made me welcome:
Once that was recognised, we were in touch

Their draughty streets, end-on to hills, the faint
Archaic smell of dockland, like a stable,
The herring-hawker's cry, dwindling, went
To prove me separate, not unworkable.

Living in England has no such excuse:
These are my customs and establishments
It would be much more serious to refuse.
Here no elsewhere underwrites my existence.