The high street is smaller than I remember it being. HMV is long gone, an ephemeral garden centre in its place. The shopping centre has been gutted and abandoned after a failed attempt to turn it into a sparkling Westfield’s. It’s hard to believe that only five years ago I was giggling with friends weaving in and out of the skeleton shops that remain now. I see girls exiting Lidl in my old uniform yet I can’t recognise them. Their gazes flit past me with none of the recognition that there would have been years before.
Walking the path to school, past all the shops and people that were once familiar but no longer. The guy who used to dance shirtless down the hill is nowhere to be seen and the street preachers predicting the rapture have dwindled to one determined man with a megaphone. Poundworld replaces Bonmarché, opposite Poundstretcher and only a few shop fronts away from the holy grail: Poundland.
My old school is timeless, buildings standing strong despite the new people within their embrace. Old school friends lean against the brick wall. One of them has recently taken up smoking and stands further away, mindful of Emma-who-has-asthma. We greet with the awkward hesitance of those once close, now distant but only just now realising that distance.
Conversation stops and starts and swirls and falls and we are together again. But not wholly.
There’s an awful disquiet in realising that everyone’s grown up in their time separated. We’re no longer aching, stretching too thin to fit into the space that was created when we were eleven. There’s a heavy maturity beginning to weigh on our bones, wrinkle our skin, and jade our thinking. But we play pretend. We’re childlike and excited and competing with each other to determine who has the better life. Who drinks the most. Who has the most friends now. Who has outgrown the town, thinking themselves better, and who is clinging onto the remnants of the old with a fierce tenacity.
Sitting in parks, going to chicken shops, gossiping about those we all know. We go through the motions, glad to be together but glad to have grown separate all the same. Phones are out, pictures taken and everyone tagged in an Instagram story – we no longer feature in each other’s posts.
Leaving each other at familiar bus stops, waving and promising to call. Probably meaning it at the time. Watching dusk fall over our shared hometown.
I walk through the high street and everything has changed, but my hometown remains.
Justine Russell 