A memory

or, how inexorable is a perfect word

I have a memory from the final few days of university, a clear and distinct sense of a very specific moment: sitting in my car, in the parking lot of a supermarket near campus, alone as the evening’s light faded. It was a day or so before the culmination of my undergraduate years. I’d driven there deliberately, to sit at the edge of this carpark within my green Ford Ka, selecting a spot at the furthest point from the entrance, one that would position me so I could look out across the trees, the ones the university was nestled within. It was a carpark that held no special meaning—the supermarket just happened to be the one situated between campus and our student house—but I’d chosen it as a moment to try and still time. I wasn’t going shopping; I was just going to sit there.

My days as an undergraduate were some of the most formative of my life, and though I took another major leap forward in being once I moved to Australia, I found university was a true, albeit cliched, metamorphosis. I had become someone new. I had flourished, in all manner of ways, forming some indelible friendships in the process. (It also closed a chapter on my first serious relationship and, though I didn’t know it just then, started a new one that would ultimately end badly and temporarily erode some sense of who I was. It wouldn’t be the last time that would happen.) I chose to go and sit in that carpark—days after my exams were all completed and we had mostly finished clearing out our student house—because I had fully realised that that was it, there were three years of my life simply gone. Smack! It was over. It had all vanished. Where had it gone? Why was this blissful world of friends and drinking and girls and laughter (possibly some learning, too) suddenly ending? How could it be ending? It didn’t make any sense. I was questioning whether I had even been present during those years. Truly present. I’m often prone to just drifting, letting choices be made because I can feel the current and the way it’s meant to go, which can be both beneficial and not-so-beneficial, so there I was, worrying that I had done just that through my degree—as good as it had been—and not really savoured it. I had, of course, relished almost every moment and been lucky enough to have a set of friends formed on day 1 that carried, cajoled and supported each other, but I had lived through it as though it wasn’t going to end. To my detriment. I may have sobbed there, in my car. That part of the memory is unclear. But I sat and thought about all of this for a good half an hour before we were all due to hang out for one of our final nights together.

I’m turning 40 this weekend and though I am not closing a chapter with work or moving somewhere new or—thankfully, my dear wife—undergoing any kind of breakup, this essentially nonsensical numerical transition from 39 to 40 within the space of a day has left me ruminating on that evening back in England all those years ago. Pieces of me have changed, planks have been removed and replaced, several scrubbed down or simply thrown overboard, and I often wonder to what extent I am still connected to that 21 year old. But the memory is there reminding me it was me back then, and that specific memory has been brought to the surface because I’ve been having that same feeling: how did I get here? How has time rushed by?

I still don’t have any answers.

As I departed the supermarket carpark that night, I drove around the nearby mini-roundabout the wrong way. Deliberately. It was quiet, so there was no danger in the act beyond its inherent stupidity, but for some reason I was compelled to do it. Perhaps I was reasoning that the anti-clockwise direction would somehow act to slow—better still, reverse—time. I’m not sure. I’ve never done that since, but I still remember it, just like I remember sitting there that evening and staring up at the clouds as they migrated across the campus sky, ever moving and ever changing and eventually dispersing.