Leaving Home

Today, I left St Andrews for the third and final time. And for the first time, I don’t know when I’ll be back next. The first time I left was last October, after I finished my degree and set out on my trip across Europe. That was when I started this blog. The second time was last month, when I officially graduated (but that felt more like coming back than leaving). And today, I visited it one last time with my cousin Kathleen.

Over the last week, Kathleen (whom you know as Xerxes’ keeper over the last year) and I have been road tripping around Scotland. Kathleen drove, and I navigated. We went to the Highland Games at Inveraray, toured the battle field at Culloden, visited the Glenfarclas and Balvenie distilleries, and saw the castle at Huntly; today, the last day, I showed her around St Andrews and the East Neuk.

She said, “it’s good to see a place that is such a big part of who you are as an adult.” She’s right — I hadn’t realized how much the town is a piece of me. I grew up there. When I arrived, I was 19 and hardly not a child. The previous year I had been asked to leave my high school because I was an asshole to a friend of mine (details to be explored later). I spent the next year at my mom’s house in Evanston, first finishing high school at the local public school, then volunteering at a local charity. I was still raw when I got to Scotland.

My first year at St Andrews, I lived in a large dorm a little ways out from the center of town; the next three years, I stayed in apartments in the middle of town. The last of these was where I adopted Xerxes and began this blog; I passed most of COVID lockdown in that apartment and the one before it; the socialist society reading group formed in the living room of the first in-town apartment I stayed in. I had coffee at least once in every café in town; I drank in every bar; I ate in (almost) every restaurant.

I showed Kathleen the sights today: the classrooms and quads, the cathedral and castle, the harbor and golf course. I introduced her to Hamish McHamish’s statue. As we left, I felt like I needed a cigarette: my chest was empty, like something had been taken out. It was as though I had forgotten something; as though I needed to run back to close my door one more time, or return a book to the library, or turn in an assignment; as though there were another rehearsal or social or reading group to go to; as though my friends were back there waiting for me to join them.

But they aren’t. Some are in Oxford, or London, or Sussex, or Maastricht, or Oslo, or Edinburgh, or New York, or Chicago; and some are I don’t know where. But they’ve left. I’ve left. It’s over.

And that’s fine: I’m more grown up now than I was when I arrived. It changed me. The classroom, yes, but also the town, the people, the place: the streets and stones older than the language I’m writing; the people from everywhere and nowhere in particular; the music and life of an ancient tourist trap by the sea.

I didn’t have any closure (is that the word?) when I left high school. There was no sense of an ending: the teachers came to get me in the evening after a cappella practice, and the next morning I left the campus for the last time. I didn’t graduate; I didn’t sleep in the basement hallway together with my class and carve my initials into the wood paneling; I didn’t go to the graduation parties after moving out. It was just, suddenly, over.

This was the opposite: it lingered; it went on; it never seemed quite done. I finished my course, but I didn’t leave town right away; I left town, but I didn’t graduate; I graduated, but I knew I was coming back soon. Today I left St Andrews, and for the first time in five years, I don’t know when I’m going back.

I don’t know, yet, how going to university there will shape my life, and I can’t sum up four years of my life in a few words. More than four years: I first visited St Andrews in the summer of 2015 and knew immediately that it was where I was going to go to university. Seven years later, it’s over. I was seventeen when I made that decision; I’m twenty-four now, but I won’t be for long. Just under a month from now, I start the program at the University of Illinois. I don’t know what to say to finish this post. I don’t know whether I can finish it. Leaving St Andrews isn’t the end, just a change: my life goes on, and on, and on…