Walking Out

I’m 19 years old and I’m standing at the bus-stop in the rain, feeling the kind of alone you can only feel when the only two other people there are there together. One of them is her, who I haven’t had the nerve to speak to since the second night I was here. The other is at least the second bloke she’s been out with since then. I get on the bus and hide away somewhere non-descript, knowing full well that they are going exactly where I’m going, pretending otherwise.

I get to the campus and decide to disappear somewhere else for a few minutes rather than go straight into the gig. I go down to the cashpoint to pass the time and, after I’ve been dancing the dance with the bank for the previous few weeks, it retains my card leaving me with no choice but to actually go and talk to them. Or starve. I will go and talk to them.

I go back upstairs and into the gig. There aren’t enough people there for me to ignore the two of them, although the lights going out and the support act coming on helps but the fact is, I don’t want to be here. I bought this ticket the first day I arrived and this is one of the things I’ve been looking forward to for weeks but I just don’t want to be here….

So I leave. Just turn around and walk out. And then, for the next 24 years, I don’t listen to them again.

Things got a bit better after that night – I didn’t pull things together enough to really get through the first term as I should have done but I did enough to make sure I wouldn’t have to leave and that night became a little totemistic, the low point, the moment I turned things around. I even went to talk to the bank and, for a little while, sorted things out with them.

The Mighty Lemon Drops – Happy Head mp3

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