READER’S short story
Mum Jeanette Palmer wrote about her fear of the empty nest last week. Today’s 28-year-old author, Ryan Hevey, from St Helens, Merseyside, writes from the perspective of a student, drawing on how he felt when he left for university to study philosophy and literature in 2017…
Rupert had recently broken up with his girlfriend, which plunged him into a severely depressive episode, made worse by the fact that at the age of 23, having been dependent on his parents and living under their roof, he was about to lose all his creature comforts and go off to fend for himself at university.
He would miss his routine of making his mother 50 cups of tea a day. He would miss her home-cooked meals, and the three of them eating together at the cramped breakfast table.
He would even miss the wall-mounted TV and the news headlines that blared out over every meal, which used to drive him mad, and was now also to be cruelly taken away.
He knew his parents would be heartbroken without him, but he put on a brave face, even though the music coming through the tinny car speakers on the journey to halls seemed to be about loss and heartbreak, as if the radio DJs knew that he was journeying into unknown lands.
When they arrived, there were a few students milling about, but it wasn’t as noisy and intimidating as Rupert expected.
Once everything was unpacked, Rupert’s parents hugged and left him, rather quickly, he thought, to acclimatise to his new life. Rupert could hear people talking down the hall but felt too afraid to leave the safety of his bedroom. He also felt too afraid to leave his door open as he had been advised on online forums.
He went to the door, started to turn the handle, then changed his mind and returned to his computer desk to sit down, his heart thundering in his chest.
He heard more people pass his door throughout the day as he sat, too shy to leave. Eventually the threat of starvation gave him courage, and he made his way down to the kitchen where his new housemates were hanging out. He found himself chatting to a pretty, dark-haired girl. “Maybe university won’t be so bad after all,” Rupert thought, completely forgetting about his break-up. He began to realise his anxious pre-undergrad mind had built the move to university to be something it wasn’t.
Rupert threw himself into university life and went on to pursue his studies with a fervour that even his parents weren’t expecting. But they were never far from his mind, and neither was his appreciation for everything they had done to give him the opportunity of a lifetime.
Your 500-word short story can be fact or fiction. Send them to siobhan.mcnally@mirror.co.uk