Different cities, different people

My friends in Liverpool make fun of me for being too busy and too communicative. Once, they asked me to count the number of WhatsApp conversations I’d interacted with in that day, and seemed horrified when I said 23. Everyone else they told also seemed shocked. This was on the back of a particularly busy time, where I was in my three cities in the space of a couple days and I felt a little shell shocked.

Like any other basic idiot who spends all of her time on social media, I get a lot of my music from TikTok. A currently viral song sparked something in me.

Djo’s End of Beginning features the lyrics “and when I’m back in Chicago, I feel it/Another version of me, I was in it/I wave goodbye to the end of beginning”. It resonated me as I hopped from trains, to planes, to cars to buses, going to London on a Saturday, back to Liverpool on the Sunday, then to Dublin on the Monday.

I don’t know why I’ve felt the need to move to one city at 19, another at 29, and then the one I currently live in at 32. The song spoke to an odd sense of self that I have, leaving different versions of myself in these cities, and picking them back up when I visit. It’s a hard one to articulate, but Dublin feels like an old friend, the place where I became a young adult, partying and doing some of my best adventuring. London feels adult, where I grew into the corporate career I still have. Liverpool feels like coming home, being in a city that feels like a hug, where I’m sober, and living a pretty quiet life.

The best thing about these different selves is the friends and loved ones I have in each of these places. We’ve all learned and grown together, like plants that stay in the same space and wrap around one another, leaning toward the sun. It’s never a burden to go back to London or Dublin, but I always feel like Liverpool is calling me back. I've lost people along the way, but the ones that have stayed with me feel like the anchors that bring me back to my truest sense of self (whatever that is) wherever I am.

This is a bit of a ramble that probably belongs in a journal rather than my Substack, but to keep it on theme, I read Fiona Williams’ The House of Broken Bricks in two sittings on my journeys to and from London and cried ugly sobs both times. I then got to meet Fiona, a warm, intelligent and hilarious person, when she came to The West Kirby Bookshop. It’s one of the best books I’ve read recently, treating the landscape of the Somerset Levels, as well as the titular house as living and breathing organisms of their own. It also speaks much more articulately about my own feelings above, with one of the characters experiencing the pull between London, where she grew up, and the Levels, where her life and family are.

While my phone time and WhatsApp interactions probably do need to be shorn down a bit (I’m working on it), I’m grateful for the relationships that I’ve managed to keep warm and loving across time and place. I’m grateful to have been loved across the different seasons of my life, and hope that it continues as I get older. The summer is already looking busy with various different trips and adventures, as well as some big changes in my life, but there is much to be excited about.