This is so prescient as a writing prompt as I was reminiscing with an old friend just last night, going over the years when we had been particularly close. And from that I have chosen a year I would like to relive.
When I went to study for my Masters degree at the University of Sussex, it was an incredibly difficult time for me. My beloved grandmother had died earlier that year and I had kind of put my grief on hold to get through the final year of my undergraduate course at Cardiff. When I got home in the summer, I released all the tension and started the summer break with laryngitis and bronchitis. I already knew I was going to Sussex Uni for my postgraduate degree, and so some of the summer was spent finding somewhere to live and sorting that out as well as catching up with old friends, starting horse riding again, and just trying to deal with the overwhelming grief as well as working a rather challenging summer job with the Probation Service. My overriding memory of that summer, though, is that there was a huge gap in my life and I just didn’t know how to deal with it, to fill it.
I was also in a transition period. In Cardiff I had known the city, I’d had lots of friends and some very close ones whom I missed. I had loved being in Cardiff and had only not done my postgraduate course there because the lecturer I would have wanted to study with was on a sabbatical. I just wasn’t self-aware enough at the time to know that I was in a really tumultuous time emotionally. In fact, I almost inadvertently joined Scientology when I first got to Brighton!
I was waiting for my friend to arrive (she was staying for a few days to help me settle in), and was killing time before walking to the train station to meet her. A man approached me to fill out a questionnaire and I thought, ‘why not?’. I did that, was asked to enter the building and do some more questionnaires which I agreed to because, still killing time. And was told that because of my results, I was looking for something to anchor me basically. They weren’t wrong, but Scientology was not the answer. I remember asking if it was a cult because something about L. Ron Hubbard’s books being displayed everywhere set alarm bells ringing. I didn’t known anything about Scientology or L. Ron Hubbard at that point, but it just felt wrong instinctively. They fudged the answer and I just looked for a reason to run. Luckily, going to meet my friend provided it for me and I dodged a huge bullet! Thank God for my Guardian Angel working overtime that day!
You might think – why would she want to relive this year? It sounds terrible so far! And you wouldn’t be wrong. But when I started my degree, I met someone. As soon as I did, I knew this was something significant. When I saw him, I heard the same voice in my head as I did when I met my husband. It whispered ‘yes’. I fell madly in love. Deeply, intensely, overwhelmingly. I was totally screwed up from my childhood, I was grieving, and I was in entirely unfamiliar territory. But I was so in love. From that perspective, from the time I started my course, the following year was magical.
We lived in a bubble, really. Cocooned by living away from everyone we knew, in the beautiful place that is Brighton, studying for our Masters degrees (different ones to each other), loving the academic life, and being completely into each other in a way I’d never experienced before. I’d had boyfriends before him, but none had impacted me the way he did. Maybe it was because all the love I’d had for my grandmother was looking for somewhere else to go, I don’t know. But it was a huge love.
Of course it ended in heartbreak for both of us years down the line, but from that we might eventually salvage a friendship. Who knows. There is a part of me, though, that would love to relive that year of studying for my Masters, living in that bubble and being desperately in love. Which is why I have chosen that 12 months of 1997/98.
Louisa Simpson 