I finished a book this morning. It's called Love in The Big City by Park Sang Young, and follows a gay man in Seoul throughout several unsuccessful romances over several years. It's a messy and resonant depiction of city life, and of the gay experience. I liked it.
The film (of the same name) adapts and expands on the book's first few chapters, which tell the story of the narrator's chaotic and loving friendship with Jae-hee, who he met at University. I put the film on a few hours after finishing the book, for a good time. I wanted to watch a sweet and funny story about friendship, with a relatable queer lead.
I spent a good chunk of it's run time crying. It looked so much like what my life used to be.
Belfast was my Seoul (as ridiculous as that sounds).
I'm lucky to have and have had many lovely queer friendships in my life, and I met the first really defining one during Fresher's week.
His flatmate and my flatmate were old friends from school, which was how a big group of us ended up in my kitchen, having pres before going out on a pub crawl (it's only now that I'm writing this that I realise quite how uniquely first year it is to have pres for a pub crawl). At one point, a few of us were stood round a table, and I found myself next to him.
With no prompting at all, he held up a picture on his phone, it was of some burly bloke with dark hair, and he asked me if I thought he was good looking. I can't remember what I said, but knowing me it was probably quite an abrupt "no". But then Bradley looked at me with this very proud sort of smile and announced that he'd slept with him the night before. His first fresher's hookup.
I'd been oddly wary of him up until he'd said that. I can't actually remember why. But by the end of the night I was falling asleep on his shoulder as he laughed at my first and last attempt to order chips and gravy outside of the North of England.
We had a routine in first year. On Fridays, a group of us went to the student union, the locals all had jobs in their hometowns so would go back to their parents' houses on a weekend and come back on Monday or Tuesday with bags of groceries bought for them. This meant the weekend crowd both at pres and at the student union was a fairly consistent and reliable mix of international students and other English people like me and Bradley.
Saturdays were Kremlin. Just me and him. It was their most expensive night and there were no other students there. If you got there before 11, entry was a fiver, if you got there after, it was a tenner. In the whole year of going every single week, we didn't make it there before 11 even once. In those days Kremlin was still a gay club and still a good night out (or maybe I just drank more back then? who knows?). Sometimes we'd go and the entry stamp would be the word GAY in huge black capital letters, brandished on the back of our hands for the night and most of the next morning. We both found this equal parts amusing and slightly terrifying.
Some nights I'd be kicked out for falling asleep on the dance floor (or on one infamous occasion I have no recollection of, for going behind the bar), and we'd walk all the way back to our halls together, which must have taken about an hour each time. I remember only a couple of that chats we had on those walks. One, about a month into our time in Belfast, about how we already thought of it as home, another, about how we wished we had some coke "just a tiny bit. just as a pick me up." (neither of us were really coke users), and the time he spent most of the walk giving me a pep talk about how to come out to my parents. It's been five years since that conversation took place, and I still haven't gotten around to doing it.
I drank such disgusting amounts in those days, that most Sunday mornings I woke up with a throat so dry it hurt to swallow.
Nights out were our thing, especially in the early years of our friendship. It wasn't actually until the end of our first term that we saw each other fully sober for the first time.
Our first outside-of-Belfast night out was on Canal Street in Manchester, the day before New Year's Eve. We were both drinking double vodka red bulls, which they served in tiny cups, throwing the vodka to red bull ratio rather too far in vodka's direction. They were horrible. In the days before he met his lovely boyfriend, and before I lost interest in making out with strangers, we were a perfect pair. He'd find a boy, and I'd find a girl (or as was quite often the case, a woman about ten years too old for me). That night I'd made out with two women, and then the best friend of the boy Bradley was with. (Back then I still had a habit of making out with boys when I get very very drunk, despite not fancying them at all). I told this boy to his face that I was a lesbian and he laughed and said "I know, I saw you kissing that girl earlier." The lads walked us back to our hotel, and Bradley spent most of the morning after lamenting that we hadn't invited them up. I looked at him in horror and asked what on earth I, a lesbian, was supposed to do with a boy in my room. Not to mention the fact our shared hotel room only had one bed.
That night I managed to lose my phone, my debit card, and my ID, which I would need for my flight back to Belfast. Bradley was going back a few days before me so, (after he very kindly bought me a train ticket home) I gave him the key to my room in Belfast so that he could find my passport and post it to me.
When we both made it back to Belfast in the new year, he informed me that he was "thinking about doing dry January, except for Fridays and Saturdays."–and then moments later added that he might have to give himself Tuesdays off as well.
I wasn't always the most considerate friend. On one of our Friday nights out, he spent hours and hours crying because the boy he'd been (sort of) seeing was getting with some pretentious twat who worked at the student union. Not once in that whole night of seeing my friend barely able to look away from that heartbreaking sight and crying his eyes out, did it occur to me that I should just walk him home.
These are the times I was thinking about when I watched Love In The Big City. And I found myself doing the thing I try so hard not to– hating myself for ever leaving. I find myself repeating the same things to myself about being back home. It's nice to be close to the countryside. West Yorkshire is my home, I was always gonna come back here one day.
This is what I mean about nostalgia. In a way it's a good thing that I look back and only remember the stories good enough to laugh about. I want to think of myself as a joyful person, so that I can be joyful going forwards. I think of my years in Belfast as the most incredible time, and sometimes, it was. I've only written about one friend here, but I had dozens of equally amazing people around me (some of whom will read this blog! hello!), and I was besotted with the town itself. The problem being, because of this, I convince myself that now my life is different, it's so much worse.
But it's a lie to remember myself as always being happy there. As an undergrad, me and my friends went on great nights out, but I often spent the daytime so bored and lonely it drove me to tears.
I read some of my old diaries recently, the ones from my early school years, in particular, are a hoot, but the one written during my second year of university showed a version of myself I hardly recognised. A girl so incredibly miserable she cried on the phone to her dad almost every day, a girl so debilitatingly anxious she rarely left her flat.
I spend a lot of time contemplating what gets me so nostalgic and introspective, why I think so much about where I should be and what my life should look like. Why I even read my old diaries in the first place. In reality, it's probably not all that complicated. I think it's just that my friends are my whole world, and I don't quite feel myself without them.
