Even throughout the tumultuous spring of 1998 and the ambiguous summer that followed, Worcester still had a sense of possibility to it. There was potential for things to turn around in ways that Joe and myself would talk about, sat on the freezer of 136 London Road, stoned (probably), late with essays (always) and convinced that we would finish college and somehow end up being writers.
That winter though, Worcester lost something. I suppose everyone knew that university was coming to an end. Writing out dissertations ruled everything. 1999 came, and a certain kind of emptiness began to spread through those streets and roads that I had called home for over two years now. I like to think that even back then I knew that there would be nothing new here. I suppose on some levels I might have done - but I probably didn't - but the emptiness in the city - in myself - was quite striking. Everything clean and new and bright and robbed of all possibilities.
In some ways this was the calm before the storm. March came, and there was war in Europe again - NATO bombing Yugoslavia, Prstina Airport, Russian and NATO tanks in a face-off against each other. Spring turning to early summer, and somehow I managed to finish my dissertation (on the late Victorian / early Edwardian ghost story) and convinced myself that armageddon was about to begin and that everyone's translations of Nostradamus's prophecies had been right and there was going to be an apocalypse that summer.
By the time I came to leave Worcester - on the last day of June 1999 - and 4 days before armageddon was supposed to occur, I was in a state of heavy depression and anxiety, and prone to panic attacks. I was never able really to say goodbye to Worcester. I just left in such a state of crisis that I didn't have the time or energy to look back. I didn't say goodbye to the place. Dad had come to pick me and my stuff up in a van to take me to Cornwall where my parents were living at the time in St Columb Major. I had some vague plans of moving to Brighton that summer (I eventually did this in the winter of that year) but nothing beyond that.
I sometimes wonder if that's why Worcester - my time living there, and the place - haunts me much, because I never really got a sense of closure from the place, and on a deeper level, that because my perception over most of the time living there were so shadowy and darkened, that I never really got from my time there what I should have.
So now I'll sit at work and draw cartoons of her streets, and at night dream I return to my old house there, and when awake I'll daydream of her possibilities, but sometimes only feel her emptiness.
