It
didn’t start as an escape, that was never the original intention, it was just
the way the dates worked out. But you could be forgiven for thinking otherwise.
It wasn’t long until I had forgotten myself.
It’s
been a while since I’ve done one of these, since America I guess there hasn’t
really been cause for one. Although even before I left the US, I guess I kind
of tailed off a bit. It was a busy time, and eventually I just gave up on
trying to document it all. Sometimes it’s nice to just live, no records, no
posterity.
The
long and short of it all is that I continued to have a great time living in the
US, and Illinois, specifically UIUC, developed into somewhere I care for immensely,
and I will forever be grateful for the memories and the friendships I made
there. In fact, I’m going back there to visit pretty soon. Maybe that will be
worth an entry all of its own, who knows? Or maybe I’ll keep it just for myself.
After
America, I moved back to Norwich to complete the final year of my degree. As much
as I enjoyed my year abroad, I often felt that I had missed out on a lot of
time with my friends at university because of it. So, fortunately for me,
almost everyone I knew found a reason to stay in Norwich for another year
anyway. I got to have it both ways. It seemed that no one, myself included, was
too keen to jump out of our little bubble and into the real world earlier than
they absolutely had to.
Of
course, just because I wasn’t looking forward to what came next, doesn’t mean
that I managed to enjoy every moment of what I had left either. I was grateful
to be back with my old friends, yes, but as much as I may have wished
otherwise, that wasn’t all the year was about.
I
was starting to find the work a lot harder than I ever had, and I realised over
time that my desire to improve and meet the challenge just wasn’t there. Compare
that with the way I increasingly am about writing, my deep hunger to be better
and to keep working on it at every opportunity, and I was starting to
understand that I had chosen something that I was good at, but not necessarily
something that I loved. The more apparent this became, the harder I found it to
force myself through work that didn’t come easily, and vice versa. The final
two months of my degree were possibly the most stressful and awful of my life
so far. There was just no joy there. It was like an ultra-high-pressure,
dead-end job that lasted 24/7, except I was the one paying for it.
It
was always tempting to wish for the year to hurry up and end already, but in
reality, the uncertainty looming in my future scared me more than a few (or a
lot of) boring equations ever could. So, I found myself simultaneously
disliking what I was doing and praying that it would never be over. It was a
cycle I was desperate to get out of, so when my sister invited me to come and
visit her where she lived in Germany, for a week during Easter break, I quickly
accepted despite all the revision it would mean shelving for later.
I’ve
done a fair bit of travelling over the past few years, but I’ve always
maintained a regular life at the same time, dipping my toes in the waters of
the world whilst keeping one foot firmly planted in familiar ground. Annie
however, has fully immersed herself in the world of travel, completely forgoing
the traditional path of university, career, etc to spend the last 2 years
travelling full-time. Our worlds had become a complete mystery to each other,
so I think both of us were looking forward to changing that.
Going
in, I knew that Annie was living on some kind of farm in Germany, but beyond
that, I didn’t really have much of an idea what kind of place I was going to,
or what staying there would entail for me. The way Annie has been able to keep
travelling for so long is by using a site called Workaway, that allows you to
search for places around the world that are willing to let you stay with them
for free in return for work of some kind. She had been at this farm, Sammatz,
for about two months when I showed up.
The
first thing I realised is that it wasn’t a farm, or at least, it wasn’t just a
farm. It was more like a village, or a large-scale commune. First, Annie showed
me “the main house”, a building the workawayers lived in that
could rival the size of some youth hostels I’d stayed in. Then she showed me
the public café, the garden, the laboratory, the bakery, the dairy, the
stables, another garden, the giant man-made lake, the agricultural fields, the
aviary, the greenhouses, and a farm shop.
Not
quite what I had imagined. The place was much bigger, more populated and more
overwhelming than I had been ready for. As the day went on, I was introduced to
person after person after person, until my head was a jumbled mess of names and
faces that, try as I might, I couldn’t match together.
It
was too much too fast. I hated my first day. Of course, I’d expected to not know
anyone, but what was worse was just how many of them I didn’t know, and more
importantly, how well they all knew each other. Annie too, it felt like she’d
known all of them since birth, not me. Lingering on the outside of conversation
after conversation that day, my worst moments of feeling like an outsider in
America came right back to me.
In the
evening, I sat in the living room in silence whilst everyone talked around me,
doing coursework I’d had no choice but to bring along, and wished I hadn’t
come. They were so tight-knit, it just seemed impenetrable. What I wouldn’t
understand until later was that despite appearances, most of them had only
known each other for a week or two, and that each and every one of them had
been new themselves at some point not so long ago.
With
Sammatz being such a large-scale operation, there are a lot of different jobs
that need doing each day. Most of the time I ended up being given gardening or
building work, but occasionally I got to work in the café too. We each worked
seven and a half hours a day, so you spend a lot of time with the people you
work with even across a relatively short amount of days. Even with a healthy
dose of social anxiety, it doesn’t take long to start breaking through the
barriers. Before long, I was on the inside of those conversations that had so
recently seemed unreachable.
The
thing that really sealed it though was on my third day, when we went to the
pub. It was Annie’s birthday and she got a big group of us together to go and
celebrate. Drinking isn’t allowed in Sammatz itself, but they do allow the use
of vehicles to go out and do it in the neighbouring villages. Though this
presents a few problems in trying to organise the acquisition of vehicles,
balancing people’s desire to go out against the number of available car spaces,
and most importantly, finding willing designated drivers. I remember it getting
to about 10:00pm, and Annie, getting so stressed out about trying pull
everything together, beginning to suggest that we give up and stay in. All I
can say is thank god that didn’t end up happening. Maybe I would have developed
the same relationships I did without that night eventually, but with only a week
to get to know people, a not unreasonable amount of which was already behind
me, I think that the help I had loosening my tongue that night may have made
the difference, that in this instance, I didn’t have the time to make on my
own.
One
such friend I made during the week was a guy called Mitch, from Michigan. We
had worked together quite a lot, and as a rule hung out with the same group of
people when we weren’t, so I had basically spent the last five days straight in
his company when he came into the cafe where I was working one morning and said
goodbye. I had known I think from the very first time we talked that he would
be leaving that day, but it had never really occurred to me that I would even care
until that very moment. Before he had just been some stranger I had known for a
couple days out of my whole life, now he was a friend I was never going to see
again.
As
I watched him walk away to go do the same thing in the next room, round the
next corner with the next person, I realized that tomorrow that would be me,
experiencing what I just had except with every single person here. I spent the
next day trying to make the most out of every available second with the people
I had met, but it wasn’t enough.
I left
wishing desperately that I wasn’t. And when I got home, it wasn’t long at all
before I had made a Workaway account and applied to come back.
Of
course, I had the rest of the school year to deal with first. There were eight
weeks to go, and in that time, I had to complete two pieces of coursework,
finish and present my masters project, and then prepare for and take my final
exams. As mentioned, I had brought one of my pieces of coursework with me to
Sammatz, but post-pub-night, it had sat in my bag untouched, gathering dust and
no small amount of guilt. Usually, I spend about this amount of time preparing
for my exams alone, so I was feeling the pressure from the first moment, and it
didn’t let up from there.
Despite
planning to be done weeks beforehand, I somehow ended up submitting my master’s
project less than an hour before my final deadline, leaving me with just a month
to revise for four huge exams. I very quickly found myself working 10-hour days
in order to keep pace. I stopped writing, I stopped seeing my friends, I
stopped leaving the house unless I needed to. The most adventurous my days got
were the odd occasions on which I had to go to the Co-Op for something. To say
that I wished I could have been anywhere else wouldn’t be quite accurate, there
was a specific place I knew I’d rather be, and specific things I knew I’d
rather be doing. There had been a couple of days towards the end of my week in
Sammatz in which I had spent all of my working hours walking round the grounds
and smearing composted poop around the bases of every rose plant I could find.
I looked back on the time fondly.
By the
time my exams were finished, it was clear to me that I hadn’t done as well as I
wanted to. I had been on track for an easy first before this year, I could even
take a bit of hit at this point and still make it over the line if I was lucky.
I didn’t necessarily know that I’d done quite enough damage to need that, but
it was starting to feel closer than I was comfortable thinking about.
Going
home for a couple of days, all anyone in my family wanted to know about was
when I would get my results, and what career I would jump into as soon as I got
them. Thinking about it made my guts churn. I just wanted to get away from it
all, and Sammatz was about to be my perfect escape, whether I had planned it
that way or not.
My
first journey to Sammatz had been riddled with complications (largely due to my
inadequate German), but I’m pleased to say that my second attempt went off
without major incident. I got back, reunited with Annie, came across my old
mentor, Klara, who would also be my mentor this time, and then got shown back
to my old room. But that was where the familiarity ended. I asked Annie who I
would still know here, and I could tell before she even started listing names
that she wouldn’t be saying many. The biggest reason I had come back as quickly
as I could manage was to try and catch the people I knew before they moved on,
but by and large I had been too late for that. When I found out that one of the
people I’d gotten to know in my brief time, Valerie, had left just the previous
week, I cursed how late my exams had been set, even if realistically, I knew
I’d needed every second. There were now around 50 people, as opposed to the
previous 35 or so, and about 8 of them were the same. Still, I’d broken in
once, I could do it again.
It
definitely took longer the second time around though. With so many more people,
it was harder not just for you to get to know everyone, but for everyone to get
to know you. You could introduce yourself 30 times in a day and still be a
stranger to 40% of the people you were living with. I had hoped at least that
it would be easy to slip back in with the people I had known from before, but
things didn’t really turn out that way. Most of them, I noticed, didn’t tend to
make many new friends these days. Being there that long, they had doubtless
made and lost more than they could count already, and although I had been there
before, I hadn’t been through that with them. It would have been quite tempting
at that point, I think, just to hang around with Annie and cling to her and her
group of friends like some kind of social life-raft, but she promptly
disappeared very shortly after I arrived to go to some music festival in the
Netherlands for a few days, giving me no choice but to traverse the waters
alone.
There
were 16 arrivals the week that I came back, most of whom were in the same
awkward position of not knowing anyone else there. It took a while, but most of
us slowly found ourselves drifting together, bonding, amongst other things, over
our familiar unfamiliarity.
One
notable moment of this process for me took place over my first weekend. Being
around for a bit longer this time, I was excited for eventually getting to see
more of the surrounding country than I previously had. At the weekends, people
sometimes go on day-trips to nearby places, and on this particular Sunday,
there was a flea market coming to the town of Hitzacker that people wanted to
check out. Some people had gone in one of the minibuses earlier in the morning,
but around lunch a small group of us decided we would combine the trip with a
bit of exercise and bike there.
There
was a shed just opposite the main house with about 20 bikes that we were allowed
to use whenever we wanted, but with the current person-to-bike ratio what it
was, there weren’t many left to choose from when we got there. The journey was
about 12km one way, and one of our number, a New Zealander named Hamish, ended
up having to do most of it on a bike with the brakes stuck slightly on, due to
lack of other options. Having not cycled in what must have been more than 2
years, I was having difficulty at times making it there on a working bike, so I
could only imagine what that must have been like. It had been his own fault
that they got stuck slightly on though, so it was difficult to feel too bad for
him about it.
We got
to the flea market, and after wandering around for about 2 minutes total, we
realised that we’d already managed to see the whole thing. It was a small
village after all, I don’t know what extravaganza we’d been expecting really.
It was just the way people had been talking in the morning had made it seem
like something special, not to be missed. But all we found were unwanted
trinkets, some old Shania Twain CDs, and a giant collection of pre-used
postcards.
We
decided to hit Hitzacker itself and find a place to eat and sit down for a
while, but we very quickly ran into another obstacle, the obstacle of being in
rural Germany on a Sunday. Nothing was open beyond a few tiny bakeries and ice
cream places. Most of us wanted a proper meal though, so we spent the next
half-hour traversing the village end to end in search of a restaurant that was
actually open on a Sunday afternoon. We bickered and argued and exasperated
each other the whole time, but mainly we just laughed at our own incompetence,
our own stupidity and inability to agree on something. I’m usually pretty quick
to see the funny side of a plan going south, so I was pleased to be with a
group of people that were much the same way about it all. It was a terrific
shambles of an afternoon, and I’m thankful to all involved for every
frustrating minute. We did eventually find our restaurant, and I can’t remember
whether the food was any good or not, but, for the sake of the story, we’ll say
that it was glorious, and the 12km journey back even more so.
A
typical day in Sammatz started, at least for me, at around 7:30am, at which
point I would drag myself from bed and get dressed, before grabbing whatever
breakfast was quickest and easiest (usually cereal) to find that day. Then at
8:00am we would all gather in the main hallway to receive our work assignments
for the day. It might sound a little weird, only knowing what you’re going to
spend your day doing just seconds before you’re asked to go and do it, but I
think it’s actually kind of brilliant really. No one wakes up dreading an
assignment they know they don’t want to do. Every day, people wake up with hope
in their hearts, hope that just maybe they’ll get all their favourite jobs that
day, and even if that hope was usually crushed in fairly short order, you’ve
already got your work clothes on at that point.
There
are a lot of different tasks that need performing each day, but there were
starting to be a lot of us too. Our number had been about 50 upon my arrival,
but a week later it was getting up past 60. This meant that as much as they
tried to shuffle people around so that they got a taste of some of the more
specialized tasks, like milking, bakery work, animal care etc, there just
wasn’t enough to go around, so most people would just end up working in the
garden more often than not. On the one hand, that could get a bit monotonous,
but on the other, with 30+ people on the same shift as you, it was by the far
the most social way to spend your day. Working in the garden was where I first
got to know a lot of my friends in Sammatz. But yeah, ripping out weeds for
seven and a half hours a day can be enough to make you wish that every plant on
the face of the earth would photosynthesise itself into an early grave.
The
morning shift would break at 12:30pm for lunch, and then the afternoon shift
would go from 2:00pm until 5:00pm for most people, although certain jobs had
the odd variation on that. 5:00pm was always my favourite time to end though,
because that was when everyone would go to the café together to grab a snack
and chill for a bit after work.
As
part of the agreed-upon compensation for our labour, each workawayer was
entitled to an ice-cream and a drink from the café on every day that they worked.
You could go and get it any time you want, but the best time (although arguably
not best for the café) was right after work; we would all flood the place at
once, and take some time to unwind with each other and our choice of
refreshment.
After
that, the evening was whatever you made of it. Unlike lunch however, our
evening meal wasn’t prepared for us by the kitchen staff, so dinner plans
usually factored heavily into this part of the day. Some people cooked alone,
but most would group up and make something to share between them. In the first
few days, trying to find an established group to latch onto at this point would
always bring me out in a sweat of social anxiety, and there were a couple of
times early on that I just ate whatever bread and fruit I could find lying
around rather than work up the nerve to try and join anyone.
Surely
enough though, things got a bit easier as my own circle of friends started to
develop. There was one person in particular, an Argentinian girl named Vani,
that myself and more than a few others began turning to every night when it
came time to start looking through the cupboards. She was a fitness trainer
back in Argentina, and as well as constantly trying to garner interest in
leading workouts for us in our free time, her fitness background would come out
in the form of having about a thousand healthy, diet appropriate recipes for every
imaginable situation. The biggest reason I think so many people flocked to
cooking with her though, was her compulsion to try and accommodate literally
anyone that asked. Most groups would try and make enough food for somewhere up
to 10 people, but we would usually find ourselves shooting for double or close
to triple that. There was one night, wherein we used literally all of the
potatoes in the house trying to make ñoquis for as
many people as we could manage. We converted the whole kitchen into a
production line, covering near every surface in flour and little balls of
potato, readying them for the industrial-sized pot we had on the boil. People
kept breaking out into chants of Seven Nation Army to spur us on whilst we worked,
although with people from all over the world in that kitchen, I’d say we were
closer to a twenty-one-nation army at the time; we should have sung it in
rounds.
Group
meals grew from being my nightly panic to being one of my favourite parts of
living in Sammatz, they were a time for the people that got involved to come
together and provide something for each other, to bond and enjoy each other’s
company whilst sharing the fruits of their collective labour. After eating, sometimes
we would sit and talk in the kitchen until close to bedtime. Sometimes we would
organise movie nights instead, or game nights, or trips to the pub. There would
always be something you could spend your evening doing, and someone you could
spend it with. Despite the long days, and the early starts, and the endless,
endless weeding, my typical day suited me just fine.
An
Englishman, an Argentinian, and a Belgian walk into a bar, or at least they try
to. Mostly they just walk though.
Luis,
someone that had been there throughout both my stays at Sammatz, was leaving
and, with the clout his impressive tenure had garnered him, he had secured a
lift directly to Hamburg airport at 5:30am one Saturday morning. It was quietly
mentioned at one point that a couple of people could use the opportunity to get
a free lift to Hamburg that weekend, should anyone be interested in going. Then
it was quietly mentioned by someone else, who quietly mentioned it to someone
else and someone else, and before I could ask myself why eschewing an €8.70
train fare was important enough to me to get up at such a ridiculous hour, I
was face to face in the hall at 5:00am with 11 other people plus driver, all trying
and failing miserably not to look too disappointed to see each other. I don’t
know what it is about people in Sammatz and their ability to group up in sizes
just larger than the capacity of a minibus, but it’s always funny watching the
mood of whoever is counting interest in an offsite activity go inevitably from
increasing excitement to increasing despair as soon as the number 9 is reached.
In the
end, some people found themselves “volunteering” to get the train, but I was
damned if I was one of them. The principle of it aside, it was nice to spend a
final hour or two with Luis whilst we travelled, what time I didn’t sleep
through at least. I hadn’t known him as well as I did some, but there hadn’t
been a day I’d spent here without him. He had coloured every day of my
experience here in one way or another, and I believe my time was the better for
it, so I appreciated the chance to try and pay back what little of that I could
by being there for his last goodbyes.
The
other people in the minibus with me were Eline, Vani, and Sangwon, but the
latter was headed to visit a friend, so despite how many we started with, we
spent the day as a three. None of us had much of an idea about what we wanted
to do, or what there even was to do, so Vani used her endless network of
travelling friends to find a couple of suggestions for us. Suggestion number
one was a street called Reeperbahn, but after a lot of walking to get there,
and some mild getting lost, we quickly found that it was a place you would much
rather be at 11:00pm than 11:00am. Hamburg’s premier bar scene has nothing
there of interest during the morning but a bunch of alcoholics sleeping off the
morning’s hangover and staring longingly through the shutters of whatever
establishment they passed out in front of the previous night.
Suggestion
number two was the Hamburg philharmonic. Not for the sake of seeing any
performance, but the building itself is free to go up and take in a nice view
of the city from. Had it not been for all the rain and the clouds, I’m sure it
would have been brilliant, but as it was … well I guess it killed some time.
After
that, we found a place to sit and eat, and just hung out there for an hour or
three. I was with two of my better friends I’d made here, so we were still able
to just chat and have a good time, even with the day against us. Similarly to
Hitzacker, it was nice to have people capable of turning something that could
have been bad into something good, just by virtue of being there.
We
walked aimlessly after lunch until we found ourselves close to the train
station, and as we did so, Vani tried to teach me and Eline the lyrics to the
Macarena. It’s like 4 lines, two of which are the same and one of which is
“Heeeeeey Macarena!”, but it stumped us for the whole walk (I can do it now
though, and yes, I am available for school discos). We didn’t have that much
more time left, as the train we would have to take once we were further back
into the countryside doesn’t run that late, so we decided to have a quiet drink
in a pub somewhere and then make our way back to the station. You would think
that finding a place in Germany that served beer wouldn’t be that hard. Maybe
we just walked down the exact longest route in Hamburg you can take without
hitting a pub, who knows? But it was long enough that after finding one and
having a drink, we had to run back to make the train. But hey, it set up the
line at the top of this section, so I’m content with the sacrifice just for
that.
When
we got back that night, there were multiple faces wandering around that none of
us recognised. Apparently, there had been eight new arrivals in the last 24
hours, some whilst we’d been out, and some that we just hadn’t come across the
previous night. Word had it that there would be 20 total across the week. In
the beginning, I had done my best to get to know new people whenever they came,
but in the space of two weeks, I had already given up. The volume of people
coming through this place and out again was too much to keep track of. It was a
whirling, revolving door of names, faces, strangers, and friends. The best that
any of us could hope for was to make what connections we could with the people
pressed up against the same part of the glass.
Overwhelmingly, people tended to group up with
those that had arrived within a similar timeframe, and due to the current rate
of flux, those timeframes were not that large either. Despite arriving less
than two weeks ago, the “generation” I was part of wasn’t even the newest we
had, and the group that had just arrived would no doubt form another. Still, we
couldn’t balloon forever. Every arrival ends with a departure eventually, and
pretty soon our group would watch its first members make their way beyond the
door and out the other side.
Vani
and Eline both moved on not too long after Hamburg, the former to Cardiff, the
latter to Berlin. Vani had been promising to leave soon ever since I’d known
her. Eline, on the other hand, announced her departure very suddenly. Differing
circumstances aside, the day they each chose to leave was the same.
We had
plans for a big farewell dinner, and whilst Vani was usually assumed the mantle
of head chef in the evenings, she and Eline demanded that I do it that night,
and that I make something English for them. This would have had me panicking a
week and half ago, but having helped out almost every night since then … I was
still panicking, but I least I had a sense of how to go about things. I was
struggling with what to make though, so I enlisted Matt, another bona fide
English person, to help me. Classically English dishes, like Fish and Chips or
a roast dinner, were just impossible given our resources, so after some
googling, and some extensive cupboard-searching, we decided on Shepperd’s Pie,
vegetarian edition. It took us … a lot longer than we originally planned, but
we did pull it off, and by some miracle, people actually seemed to enjoy it
(Eline hates onions though, and we made it with onion gravy, so … no plan is
ever perfect).
Our
group hung out in the kitchen the whole night, laughing and talking and reminiscing
over our two whole weeks together. We even did all the soppy, commemorative
stuff, like taking a group photo of everyone that was there, and setting up a
Facebook chat with everyone in that we all promised we’d definitely, totally use all the time. But eventually, the time came to say goodbye, and then the
next morning they were gone.
It was a
common joke amongst all the volunteers that time doesn’t exist here.
Out here in the middle of nowhere, we seem almost to exist in a kind of
wormhole, or some distorted, alternate dimension. One where days can last an
eternity even whilst weeks go by in an instant, one where lifetimes of
friendship can come and go in the blink of an eye.
It
was hard to believe the sadness I felt the next day was over people I had known
not for a matter of years, or even months, but weeks. It hurt, not just for
them, but for the knowledge, real and unavoidable for the first time, that this
was all temporary. This group, this life, it was going to end, and sooner
rather than later. Time does still exist here, it’s a little harder to perceive
perhaps, but it still exists, and it was marching on at the same relentless
pace it always had.
Annie
was one of the select few in Sammatz that had a steady job assignment. She
spent three mornings a week watering the trees and potted plants across the
entire grounds. Technically, it only requires one person to do it, but it’s a
long job to do alone, so she would usually get someone to come and help her with it.
Thanks,
in part but not entirely, to her Netherlands trip, I hadn’t seen that much of
Annie at the beginning of my stay. But as the weeks went on, we did finally
begin spending more time with each other, and eventually she suggested to me
that I should try and get myself assigned to the trees with her.
The
two of us haven’t talked with an incredible frequency since I went to
university, but in truth, we haven’t been close really since we were both in
double digits. People, ourselves included, always talk about how different we
are; artist/mathematician, student/traveler etc. But the more I think about it,
the more I tend to view those differences as very surface level; cosmetic,
outward-facing things. Inwardly, I think we’re perhaps a lot more similar than
either of us realised before now. I feel like the wavelengths we operate on are
actually quite similar, even if the waves themselves are very different. I can
always count on her more surely than anyone else here to agree with an idea, or
laugh at a joke, or just understand what I’m trying to say. I don’t know, maybe
that’s more familiarity than it is similarity, but whatever it is, it’s nice to
finally have it back. We did the trees together for the rest of the time I was
there, and along with the egregious breaks we used to get away with due to not
having any supervision, it became a favourite assignment of mine.
We
were in the middle of such a break one morning, hanging out in the upstairs
kitchen and getting coffee, when the subject of the day’s date got brought up,
and we discovered it was July 10th. I realised I had been here 3
weeks now and that my university results were out. They had been for days.
Despite
constantly telling people that I had just finished university, that I would be
leaving here soon to attend my graduation, and even discussing my dissertation
at length with a couple of curious people, school (or rather my continued
involvement in it) hadn’t been a part of my conscious thoughts for some time
now, and in all honesty, I wished it could have stayed that way. I had been
quite comfortable with my head buried nicely in the sand (or, more accurately
in this instance, the soil), and I had no desire to be dragged back out into
the world at large.
Annie
begged me to go check them, to get my laptop and open my results right there in
the kitchen, but I made excuses and put it off until I was alone. I would have
liked to open them with her, it would have been a nice moment, and I wish I
could have been brave enough for that, but I just wasn’t. I know my sister
would have been proud no matter how I’d done, she would have thought a 2:1 was
great, and she would have been right to. But after being on track for a first
for so long, stumbling on the final hurdle would have been too embarrassing for
me to let anyone else see live and in stereo. As it was, I opened my results by
myself. I saw that I had a first, saw that I hadn’t even come close to messing up
the way I thought I might have, saw that I had been a full 14 percentage points
clear of the danger zone I’d so desperately feared I was in, saw that all the
worry and panic I had accrued over the last several months had been for
nothing, and cried alone in my room, clutching my laptop as a breath, four
years in the making, finally escaped.
I went
and found Annie, and she gave me a hug and congratulated me, as I knew she
would, and then I tried to avoid wondering what I would do next. There was
still a few days’ worth of sand left yet, it would be a shame not to use them.
I had
less than a week left now, but my own departure wouldn’t be the final one I
endured. Matt was one of the first people I met upon my return to Sammatz. On
my first day back, there had been a trip to the lake happening after work, and
have recently learnt that I knew almost no one again, I got myself involved
with notion of trying to change that. I’m trying to remember the other people
that were there that day, and I think that out of the ones I didn’t already
know, Matt might have been the only person I was actually successful in
befriending. But that had been enough.
We
tried to do a big, farewell meal, as had become custom. The initial goal had
been a speciality of Matt’s, egg-fried rice, but despite scouring the house, we
found a total of just 3 eggs to work with. Some alternate flashes of culinary
inspiration ran into similar problems soon thereafter. With about 85 of us now,
as much as the food buyers desperately tried to keep up, supplies were
consistently scarce. I mean, you could always make a meal if you tried, but if
you were ever searching for an item in particular, whatever it was, you could always
bet that was the one thing we’d just run out of. In my final couple of weeks,
evening meals like curry or soup, your basic
throw-whatever-you-can-find-in-a-pot jobs, were decided upon with an
ever-increasing frequency, and that night ended up being no different.
Dinner
still turned out pretty nice in the end, but it didn’t feel like the right
send-off, so we conspired to make the night special a different way. Armed with
Hamish’s laptop and a spotty internet connection, we took to the living room
and turned it into a makeshift karaoke den.
We all
proceeded to shred away our vocal chords, letting loose and screaming away to
every belter under the sun. “I Will Always Love You”, “I Don’t Want to Miss a
Thing”, and, of course, “Bohemian Rhapsody”, among others, were murdered in
spectacular, unironic, cliché-embracing fashion. We started out with just a few
of us, but quickly drew some impressive crowds. Even as the night grew long,
and the herds began to thin, we didn’t stop until we’d exhausted every song in
our repertoire. It would have been a great night at any time, but as a goodbye
it felt extra special. It was nice, for once, to part with songs in our hearts,
rather than the usual sadness.
The
sadness came later, and it came in force. Not just the next day, but pretty much
for the rest of my time in Sammatz. It didn’t take me long to realise that, as
much as I’d liked Matt, it was about more than just him. It was about all of
it. The people I knew the best were the ones that kept leaving. My group of
friends was dwindling, and with just 4 days left, trying to make new
connections to fill the void felt pointless. Around every corner lay a new
stranger, and the sense of community I’d found initially was getting harder and
harder to locate.
Of
course, that was my initial diagnosis. But even as it was happening, I
understood that it was more about leaving all of it than anything else. Most of
my dissatisfactions were self-manufactured, easily fixable if I’d only try. I
was isolating myself, wallowing in half-formed nostalgia, clinging to a time
gone by when there was a here and now to be enjoyed for what it was if I could
just lift my head to see it. Things had changed, yes, but this place changes
all the time, and at one point I had been happy to go along for the ride. But
now as my departure approached, I was begging for it to slow down whilst I
disembarked, fighting against the very nature of the thing I had fallen in love
with in the beginning.
Annie
and I were invited to have coffee with our Sammatzian mentor, Klara, on our
final evening. Some people like to complain about the Sammatzians from time to
time, about how much work they give us, about the rules onsite, etc. but those
things and their debatable validity aside, I’d never experienced anything but
kindness from them, Klara in particular. Even amongst my wallowing, this was
something I’d been looking forward to.
By this point, Annie had decided on an
official end to her time here too, after a stint away to attend my graduation
she would only have one more week here, so Klara wanted to sit and talk with us
both for a bit, and say goodbye to us whilst we were still jointly present. I
don’t think this was standard mentor procedure, so it was nice to know (even if
more of it was probably due to Annie), that we’d made an impression here.
We
talked with her for a good hour, about a number of things including what our
time here was like, what we had been like growing up together, what it had been
like for us here together, and what the both of us were planning to go onto, where
we might end up in the future.
The
chance to reflect openly and honestly was the goodbye I hadn’t known I needed,
and I came away from it with all the clarity and closure I had been looking
for. I cried a little as I walked back to the house, now sure that I was sad to
be leaving, but having finally found a sense of peace with it.
I
always like having something to move straight onto when I leave a place, you
can reshape the ending of the last thing into the beginning of the next, and
beginnings are always more fun. There’s something to look forward to in a
beginning, there’s anticipation, there’s possibility, there’s excitement. In an
end, there’s only an end, the best you can ever hope for is some kind of
reflective poeticism.
In
this instance, I had grad week to look forward to immediately after my return.
I’d gotten the majority of my sadness out on the previous night, now waking up
on the morning of my departure, my focus was primarily on getting out of there
and onto the next thing (I got up pretty late as well, so I didn’t really leave
myself time for much else).
Nonetheless,
I was glad to have Annie coming with me that day. Not only was it nice not to
be leaving everyone behind all at once, but we were both able to keep our minds
off everything else by getting excited over the next week together.
Another
boon to my efforts not to think about my departure was that after a full day of
travel, first catching the train to the airport, then flying between countries,
and then driving with our parents back across England, I got a message from one
of my friends in Lincoln, asking me if I wanted to go out that night. In full
actualisation of my endings/beginnings philosophy, I immediately accepted, and
went straight from the road to the bar without even stopping by my house.
The
people I know in Lincoln are the people I went to secondary school and sixth
form with. Sure, we’ve all split off to go to university or wherever in recent
years, but when we’re back in Lincoln there’s still quite a few of us that get
together and go out like we used to. So, walking in I saw all the usual
suspects, but then in amongst them all was someone unexpected. Tia was a girl
who had been a big part of our group during sixth form but had vanished from
our lives soon afterwards, onto to bigger and better things we assumed. I
hadn’t seen her properly in four years, but there she was, talking and drinking
with everyone else like she’d never been away.
It was
very easy to imagine that night, that we were back in 2013 all over again, or
that this was some kind of reverie of the past, another old memory in a
revolving door full of nostalgia. But it wasn’t, it was a brand-new day, a new
cycle entirely, it just had some familiar passengers.
Metaphors
about revolving doors usually allude to a high turnover rate in some way;
people coming in one side and going straight out the other. That was the way I
initially used it when I was talking about people coming through Sammatz. But I
think the thing that people tend to forget, and the thing that it took this
night to remind me of, is that revolving doors turn in circles. People may flit
in and out of each other’s lives, they may turn out of sight for years or even
for good, but the option of coming back around again for another go is always
there, just a turn away. A revolving door is one never truly closed. I hope
you’ll all remember that next time you think of me, and I’ll try and do the
same for you.
Barely
a day later, I found myself in the car on the way to Norwich, travelling back
down the country when I’d only just travelled up it. My actual ceremony was on
Tuesday, but I was staying through til Saturday, the idea being that we would drink
for the rest of the time in between. Having gotten my sea legs back the other
night in Lincoln, I was looking forward to the prospect. Annie and I were also
excited, because we’d finally managed to organise it so that our friend Kassie,
an American that had been at Sammatz during my first visit and was now
travelling the UK, could come and stay with us during the week too. Things were
turning out pretty nicely now that I was back, perhaps the world I had been so
eager to escape wasn’t so bad after all. Much like with my results, the terror
had only ever been in my head.
Tuesday
came. I got up, made my way to campus, and before long I was standing in my
gown, degree in hand, getting ready to go up on stage. I remembered how the
idea of this moment had scared me for a long time. No immediate future, nothing
in front of me, no plan for what came next. But actually being here now, I felt
none of that. During the past month, the people I’d met and the stories I’d
heard had shown me that there were endless different ways to go from here, a
myriad of possibilities ready to be seized. My name was called and I walked
across the stage. This wasn’t a moment to be afraid of, this wasn’t the end of
anything. This was the beginning of whatever I wanted it to be, and beginnings
are always more fun.
