I mean being willing to let go of old memories and hopes and feelings, maybe that I once had when here, perhaps still unrequited and lingering through twenty years of lost history without me knowing. I needed closure.
That’s why I’ve been going back to places in Bath that trigger those memories. There was a feeling to capture - and I felt it as clear as the daylight when I walked up to Alexandra Park.
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I don’t know how I first found out about the park. I can’t remember - perhaps it was an accident; another tiny hidden treasure I hung onto. I’d drive up there in my old beaten up mini metro, through Bear Flat, along Shakespeare Avenue, in through the Victorian gates, and round the circular path to the place where the wind parts the trees and reveals the city below. I remember how it sparkled in the September sun.
The park was green today - full leafy green late summer, with the trees just starting to shiver their leaves like splinters. There indeed, was that lovely old city view. There indeed was the place I’d sit after lectures and lab time, unknown to everyone, thinking through the future and the past.
It’s strange when the world changes around you, especially when you don’t want it to. I had been on placement for a year, fiddling with lasers, and I’d been desperate to get back to Bath. I’d passed my driving test, fixed up the metro and independently driven back there with a carful of stuff. I had expected it to be exactly as I’d left it: I hadn’t calculated that being a final year student would be so different; still good in its own way, but much more grown-up, and different.
I spent a lot of that year foolishly trying to reverse it.
I’d felt a bit cheated I guess, out of the thing I’d hoped for all those months. I was pushing against the flow of growing up and the real world: jobs, marriage (for some), new cities, church (no longer CU), travelling adventures, and graduate programs, was calling us fourth year students. I did not want to listen. Not to begin with anyway.
I’d go to Alexandra Park often. I was in a small Bible-study group in Bear Flat, and it was much nicer to drive to the park first.
I can’t remember the final time though. There must have been one, though perhaps I hadn’t known it...
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I do remember Sara smiling at me. She was such a lovely friend, and I still couldn’t work out why my housemate Mark had ended their relationship. Perhaps it was just that it was the end of all things uni for him. He’d already gone, back to Devon before starting his new job. Now, it was my turn. I had graduated. The metro was full, and I was ready.
“Thanks Matt,” she said, climbing out at the petrol station. She needed to get to Sainsbury’s, and I needed a tank of 99p per-litre full-leaded petrol. “Have a good journey,” she beamed, as I climbed out of the other side of the car. She hugged me, and I said thanks and wished her well for her second year. And then, just like that, on a hot July afternoon, I filled up, paid up, and drove out of Bath for home.
-
I think Sara stuck in my mind as she was the very last person I said goodbye to. There were so many more I must have had fizzled partings with in that last month. There would have been a hundred uncertain goodbyes. The book closed slowly, but Sara had been the one to put it back on the shelf.
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Back to the present. The train slips into the Box Tunnel and leaves Bath and Alexandra Park behind once again.
This trip has been great. And it’s strange how the memories have come swimming back, but not it’s not strange in that melancholy way. They’ve been warm and sweet memories, not cold or lonely. Visiting Bath has reminded me that so much history has elapsed, and, strangely that, although I love it, I don’t need it any more.
I don’t require an Alexandra Park or a view of this youthful, ancient city to feel alive, young or free. I was always those things. I was those things regardless. And in some way, though both I and this place have changed so much, I still am.
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Gentle Gleams The City Bright
Gentle gleams the city bright
In silver shards of moonlit night
Where waters met with priests and kings
Now softly pass the ancient things:
The heart that held such grief unknown,
Now silver lit, now set for home
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