Today, I have travelled.
As I pass by here, I can't help it, an involuntary grin spreads from ear to ear. These towers are a monstrous insult to architecture, billowing hot steam into the atmosphere and symbolising everything that is wrong with our use of energy resources today, I'm sure. But to me, I see them coming into view and it feels like coming home.
It's not quite home. The city is not the one in which I grew up, but it is the one in which I became a grown-up. I have made the journey so often over the last four years that it feels odd that I'm unlikely to ever live there again. It was weird, being a guest in a place I know better than most others, by pure virture of the fact that I've had to find my own feet, make my own way. One night, that's all I had. One night.
It was fun night. Town was the quietest I've ever seen it, unsurprising, given that it was mid-week in non-term time: no Slacking Students about and Grown-Up People have jobs, you know. I'm somewhere in between the two of those, I suppose. After the party, pizza, poetry and live folk music, a few of us tried a few bars before deciding that nowhere will be raving at this time of night on this day of the week, so we might as well just go for the cheap cocktails and make the most of it. It was a fun night.
In the morning, I sat waiting in the station and for the first time, I wasn't going to visit home for just the weekend, for the first time, this was the end of my short break from the norm, rather than the start of it. As I realised that, an involuntary tear fell from cheek to chin. This city feels like a special kind of second home, a place to which to escape, with people to visit and precious memories encased in each street, shop, bar and cinema. I'm glad that I hold that in my heart, but I'm sad to have to leave it all, again.
I'll be back; there's no doubt about that.
On the jukebox: Kimya Dawson ~ Tyre Swing
Brilliant. Absolutely love this. Encapsulates everything I feel about Manchester. And 5 years later I'm a little ashamed (but not really) to say that whenever I leave I still get a lump in my throat. One day we'll be reunited!
ReplyDeleteBars and cheap cocktails > clubs.
ReplyDeleteGot the nostalgia already huh. It's not ever gone away for me. I loved and still love Uni City - feels a bit like a foster mother. Raised me for a short time but in those defining years so much happened I couldn't help but be shaped. x
Perhaps I'm just an adolescent in relation to my Alma Mater, then. Because I don't like it. Not yet. I've got two years, though - and, hard though it must be, I hope that I feel like you do about my Uni Town someday because that way, I'll know it was worth it. That all this growing-up nonsense wasn't as painful as all that, in the end, that it was actually a good thing.
ReplyDelete