From being a uni student to living with your parents again for the summer and everything that entails.
“Don’t be home too late”. As June began, it was like I was in a movie and I couldn’t tell the difference between a flashback scene and the present. My parents were texting me, asking me where I am and what time I would be home because “it’ll be dark soon”. It had been just a week ago in May that I was in my flat in Glasgow, counting the days until I got home to my parents, and now I’m unsure if I’ve travelled home or travelled back in time to when I was still in school. Welcome to summer at your parents’ house.
As I walked around my childhood town this summer, I saw versions of myself from what feels like a different lifetime. I saw myself walking home in my high school uniform, plaid skirt and all. I could see the childhood room I left untouched and unchanged before moving to uni. I could hear the pleading to my parents to let me go to that high school party and the subsequent arguments I had with them when I got home too late. When I get back home after almost a year of being away, it’s like no time has passed at all. As Noah Kahan said, “I’m seventeen again”. Great.
For nine months of the year, I am free to stay out, even on a Wednesday despite the looming 9 am Thursday lecture. I’m free to eat pasta three times a week because it’s easy, and wander aimlessly in the grocery store because I forgot to bring the list. Though far from perfect and hardly foolproof, this has become my life and I can’t remember a time when it wasn’t. So, coming home for the summer and standing in the doorway of my childhood room, as I used to when I was seventeen, is not quite foolproof either. It’s difficult to have to readapt to the life I once had, to make sure my whereabouts are always known, to report what time I’ll be getting home, and to feel the anger only my parents can bring out. My parents, however, very much appreciate summer bringing forth this concept of time not feeling linear. But it’s hard to blame them when they say things like “I sleep better when I know you’re home”.
I thought I knew what freedom meant when I first moved away from home and into my student accommodation. I thought it meant the opposite of all the rules, the curfews and the chores. For a while, it did. For a while, it meant staying out as long as I wanted, not having to report where I was all the time, and not getting yelled at for forgetting to take the chicken out of the freezer. But I’ve noticed that the older I get, the more arbitrary the concept of freedom becomes. It seems to keep redefining itself with each new responsibility that I acquire, like paying the electric bill, making a food shopping list and meal prepping.
I now realise why it was so important that the chicken be defrosted, after all the impromptu dinners I had to make as a result of forgetting to do so. It’d be nice to be seventeen again after all.
As August slowly ended and we start off yet another semester, I’m back in Glasgow standing in the doorway of my flat like I did just three months ago. I go to text my parents to say I’ll be home late, but remember I don’t need to do that anymore. I’ve come to realise that uni is constantly being in a loop of transition. It’s having to adjust and readjust to the multiple facets of your life that consist of your childhood home and your university life; your two villages. Spending summer at your parents’ house is our own version of Noah Kahan’s “view between villages”.
