Dear Nottingham

I have only written this year when I feel a need to. I have been to sleep for three hours. I was very drunk when my eyes closed. I've woken up with a great need to write. I still want to use this blog as I intended, to 'try and make sense of the world', however, I have learnt this year that I really have been trying to make sense of my world. I find now, that my world is about to break; my Eden bottle garden about to smash, I can see out and witness the impending hard surface it is about to hit, and here, corked inside, I can do nothing to stop it.

My world, since September has been university, this half way house to independence. Now June, this all stops and I have to go from Village life to village life. The comparison is not something I feel I want to run to, quite the opposite in fact. I have dug my heals in the ground and tried to stop time, to slow it. I've lived each day like its my last. It is my last. Today is my last. Tomorrow I leave.

I never thought for a moment, when driving here for the first time that I could learn to live in this place. The dark streets laden with soulless Nike knights, the dark, NHS, giving-up-promotional-tower, the Burger King where I felt like I was sentenced to consume my last meal... it all feels like such a long time ago. Who would have thought the city would turn into My City. I certainly did not. I was sentenced to my three years, to serve the term in full. I was to keep my head down, work hard and get a degree. Months later, I find my love.

My 'One True Love'? Not quite. This is no fairly tale city; a little pig needs to get planning before building his biodegradable house on a brownfield site, Cinderella will get into a brawl and Rumpelstiltskin will spin her straw into Cash My Gold. It is however the city I have made mine. It is the city I fell in love with. It is this city, which I now have to leave.

My life for the last few month has been that with my friends. Together living in flats and houses, getting together to drink and study (written in order of importance). When the bottle garden hits the floor, everything will smash. My fiends will be flung out back to where they moved from. They will go back 'home'. Its hard, because I don't feel like I have another home. I have a house with a room where I live. But it's not the same. Home for me is living with people who I don't always get along with, but who I know will be there for me when I need them. Home is my flat mates. Home is my friends. Now I have to go back to where I came from and act. I feel like I need to perform as an extra, in a production which is not about me. I go back and be a prop, an extra which adds nothing and takes nothing. To look big headed maybe, to want to be centre stage, but one should be able to perform the main role in their own productions. So I need to write a promise to my love.

I promise I will come back at the end of September. I will bring a tube of UHU glue and find the shards of glass. I promise I will make each piece go back together and once again fill it with life. The life inside will look different for I can not clone what I have currently. But I promise that I will put my globe on a better shelf. I look forward to returning to the city in the summer. I will visit it again. I can not wait to get back soon. We are not half the world away.