The End of the Welsh Chapter
It started in August. I was driving back from a week with my family. In the last fifteen minutes of the journey you come up off the expressway and all of a sudden, as you crest a little hill, there are THE MOUNTAINS. They spring like a pop up book ahead of you, the tallest peaks in the country, and at their tail end, the smaller hill behind my house. Usually when I see this view I feel my entire self lift – “there’s my hill! Here’s my home!”
This time though, I saw the mountains and I thought “what the hell am I doing here?” And I started to cry.
It is easy to push away these feelings during a Welsh summer, where the mountainsides dazzle in their greenery and the skies are big and blue and you can go to the beach whenever you want. But as summer started to turn into autumn, as I started to remember what winter was like, that question began to ask itself again: “what am I doing here?”
I had many reasonable answers. I have an exceptionally good friend here. I love the walking. I feel like myself in the mountains. It’s cheaper living alone here. It’s a part of my brand now. But really, the truth was this: I was here to be in proximity to someone who did not love me. I hadn’t been ready to acknowledge that because I hadn’t been ready to get over it. Maybe I still wasn’t. But what I couldn’t do now was unknow the knowledge that I was only really here to be close to a person with whom I no longer even spoke.
All of a sudden it started to make much more sense to not be here. I didn’t speak the language which was why - partly, perhaps – I hadn’t made many friends or connections, or why I hadn’t tried. It was why I didn’t go to classes and events, for fear of being the reason everyone had to suffer through a bilingual evening. Other than my good friend, I didn’t really know anyone, have anyone I could call on for support.
I went to a hen do with my friends and left full of love for them and wishing I wasn’t a 5-7 hour drive away from them, wishing that an afternoon or weekend with them wasn’t such a logistical challenge. A medical semi-emergency with my family made me wish I wasn’t four hours away if anything happened. Financially it was a no brainer to move back with my parents for a little while.
Since the break up I had been bloody minded in my insistence on staying in North Wales. I couldn’t imagine living anywhere else, this was where I belonged. But during that autumn I began to think how nice it would be to be able to get a good coffee any day of the week. How nice it would be to be able to walk there. How nice it would be to have some galleries to visit. How nice it would be to get a cinnamon bun from a bougie bakery. I began to believe that actually, my quality of life could very much be better somewhere else.
None of this is to say that staying in Wales in the first place was the wrong decision. I believe completely that it was the right decision. I believe that this is where I needed to be to heal, to unravel from the relationship I had been in, to let it all blow away in the mountains as I walked myself back to strength. I don’t believe I could have done that anywhere else. But I also believe that I have done as much as I can here. What was so supportive and generative has now become something that is stopping me from stepping into the next chapter of my life. This place was the last tether to that old relationship, old life, old version of myself. It was time to close the door, and step through a new one.
This is where my head was at in November when I went down to stay with my parents, when we discussed my moving home and the when’s and the logistics. While I was there I decided to have a little browse on the dating apps – and I met someone who asked me for my email address. Someone who was my person. Someone with whom, slowly but quickly, it became clear we wanted to do life together. I didn’t need another reason, but he made it sweeter.
So all this to say, I am once again moving. In the Spring I will be going back south, more or less exactly six years since I handed in my notice at my old job because I was starting a new life in Wales. It doesn’t look the way I thought it would, but I did indeed start a new life here – it just needs to be lived somewhere else.
