Sound of my Italian Summer, Susanna Zarli

you can hear Scottish students singing Country Roads with such intense passion. You wonder if there will ever be a night where they choose to play something other than Losing It or Pump It Up in the Well. You begin to miss hearing it when you can’t go again and berate yourself for ever being annoyed. You walk back through the West End shouting after nights out, you pick up a cone because you think it would make the perfect addition to your dirty student kitchen. You wonder why everyone who lives in the West End has the shared experience of hearing seagulls at 4am. You’ll probably get pissed off at the fi ve rugby boys doing pres upstairs again the night before a 9am. You will also probably be somewhat amazed that their pres playlists are made up of mostly Ariana Grande songs. You know who you are, Arianators.

You hit third and fourth year. You stay in a little more often and start working harder. You actually attend lectures. You hear more people in the kitchen making it up in time for 9am’s. You also hear the sound of the blender whirring in the morning because half your fl at has gotten into smoothies and breakfast bowls. You rush and try to fi nd a seat at the library at 3pm knowing that you should’ve gone earlier. You stay late at the library, even level three begins to quieten down. You still get a shock when the library announcement sounds to remind you that the cafes are shutting soon, you run down and grab as many cookies as you can. You attend your fi rst, second, third or fourth Daft Friday and wonder how you could possibly stay up till 8am. You don’t make it to the end and instead, end up in A&E listening to the chatter of other injured people because your friend got a concussion. It’s loud and the lights are bright but it’s Christmas so you take a photo with the tree in the waiting room. You hope that fourth year will promise a little peace and quiet so you can focus on your dissertation; you realise that probably won’t end up happening because you feel like your time at university is running out and you still want to make memories.

Your fi ngers are crossed for the next year. You hope to be able to make as much noise as everyone else has been able to. You can’t wait to hear your fl atmate bothering the Uber driver again about how long they’ve been with Uber to mask the sound of the girls spewing in the backseat. The noises won’t bother you eventually. You’ll get used to it. They remind you that you live in an amazingly vibrant city and that your friends are having fun. Some nights you’ll be kept up. Some nights you’ll crash before you have a chance to make it to your own bed. Moving out means change, it’ll always mean something new. The switch from a quiet farmhouse or suburban semi-detached or rented family space to a shared twelve-person kitchen will always be jarring, to say the least. Moving out is loud, and overwhelming but it is freeing. It’s an opportunity to be loud and expressive, and to stay up late chatting in the kitchen. Perhaps there will be a few raised voices and arguments along the way, and I can’t promise that it won’t be a little messy sometimes but by the time you hit the end of University, you won’t want to change any of it for the world.