“Everybody’s changing and I still feel the same” that’s the first line of the chorus of a similarly titles Keane song. That is the problem with being 20 or 21 in England. If you’ve gone to University and chosen a ‘normal’ course it means that you’ll be graduating sometime soon. This graduation is different from all others that you’ve had before because after this you should now be equipped to face the joys of new single bachelor or bachelorette-hood. It is what you have read in many books. The years of young adulthood spent living in an average to great studio. The years of independence where you do not need to rely on parental or governmental favour. The years when you’re still young enough to have a good time without really thinking about the future. It is the life you have imagined for yourself since you were 12. You work 9 to 5 every day of a 5 day week, you own a West Highland White Terrier (same breed as Snowy; Tintin’s dog) called Scrimp (alternate pronunciation of shrimp) and you have a group of like minded friends in a similar situation with whom you paint the town red every Friday night.

In truth this is only one half of the narrative regarding the mechanics of moving on. I have spent every year of my life so far in education. Moving from one phase to the next like clockwork. Everything had a map, an organised pattern that was infallible. After kindergarten I knew I would go to nursery school and after that I knew I would go to primary school and after that I knew I would go to secondary school and after that I knew I would go to an A level college and after that I knew I would go to university. What comes after university? What if the life you envisioned yourself living turns out to be further away from the reality? What do you do then? You see there’s no plan for this and it does not matter if you stay on to do a masters and then a PhD, because you know at some point that you will still be faced by this quagmire.

Even more beguiling is how jerky life has been so far. At any point when I feel that I have finally made to solid ground I feel myself yanked to another portion of the sea that I am not yet comfortable with. So just like all the other times, when I finally began to feel comfortable about life in university I see the end of my current course. I know that soon, I must prepare to sail for uncharted waters.

It is a little overwhelming when the world you know seems to be bursting at the seams. It’s the fluidity of it, the choppiness of it, the intermediacy of it, the knowledge that every step already taken was only in preparation for the next. The startling realisation that there will probably never be a time where I can stop and admire the view. So why is it that everybody’s changing and I still feel the same? Everyone around me seems to be developing some mechanism for contending with the approaching difficulty while I remain woefully unprepared. Or maybe it’s just that we’re all actors, constantly going through the motions, never letting anyone see deep enough to realise the conflicts that lie therein. Maybe whoever it was that first said nothing lasts forever had the right of it...

Happy Days,
Afam.

Last night, while fairly inebriated I stumbled upon someone I didn’t expect to see, Alex Pickard. I met Alex when I was 18 going on 19. I had met his brother Ben Pickard the previous year. The Pickards were a decent bunch. They made you believe that happiness and a good sense of humour were genetic. Not many have such a sweet disposition towards others. In Ben while these characteristics were there they seemed sullied by life. It was as if he’d had an awful experience that had marred the springtime of his youth. I could never put my finger on it, his smiles weren’t as genuine as they should have been, and his eyes seemed a little cold. He was the sort of person you never wanted to vex, because you feared what lay under the happy exterior.

Alex was different. There was nothing dark underneath the happy exterior. His joie de vivre was contagious. I can’t quite recall how we met but I can say that once we’d met he quickly became a part of the tapestry of my life.We weren’t best friends but I’d like to say that we shared a certain camaraderie. So when I saw Alex while under the influence my joy was palpable. The years fell away. Even as we held unto each other and jumped around in glee, my joy did not subside. The shear randomness of it was overwhelming. After the crazy celebration, we once-again exchanged numbers. No promises were made because I knew that I’d probably never use his number. You might ask why. Why I would not jump at the chance to reestablish contact with one of the fixtures from my last years as a teenager.

I suspect that everyone has an inkling of the answer. It’s one of those things that you learn as you get older. Here I go again, pretending that I have all the answers when I’m just as clueless as everyone else. I will probably never use that number because Alex no longer has a place in the tapestry. Things have changed. He’ll always be a fond memory. If I ever bump into him I’ll be sure to engage in a brief exchange about both our lives. It never serves to be backward thinking. I always assumed that my years at Cheltenham with Alex and the rest of the lads would be the best years of my life. So when I left I was in a little bit of an identity crisis. I set my time there on a pedestal and refused to let anything come close to it. To me those were my golden years. I would have been perfectly content to go to university without ever speaking to anyone new. I would have been satisfied to maintain the relationships I had formed there in their entirety. My fondness for the time made me incapable of adapting to the changes that leaving Cheltenham brought. It was like trying to hold syrup with my palms spread open. Aided by distance and the thousands of people we met in time spent apart from each other the thick gooey years trickled out of my hands. In my desperation to keep the bonds formed intact I constructed an equally porous net below my palms.

I can’t tell you the exact moment I realised that my attempts to fight the change were futile. It was never my place to try to obstruct the tides of life. I was only ever meant to go with the flow. Reaching back in time to pull Alex to the fore front of my current life would be doing the opposite of what I was supposed to be doing. It’s the same with every treasured memory. Why bring it to the present when you can leave it the way it is? As a memory you can visit and revisit it. You can play around with it and wonder about this and that. You can block out the awful and preserve the good, but it’s funny how after enough time even the awful becomes good. It was enough that in the seconds that I clung to Alex Pickard and jumped in circles I was allowed a brief excursion to Cheltenham. It was enough that I went back to the way it was or the way that it had been for me. It was enough that for a few moments I was back there, laughing in the common room with the boys.

Happy Days,
Afam

Happy Days,
Afam.