I lived for a year in Birmingham, in a flat that was never really mine.
It was in a part of town no one spoke of fondly — rows of red brick houses with front gardens that had given up trying. Plastic bins left out longer than necessary. Cigarette butts lodged between cracks in the concrete. Everything permanent, but tired.
I had come from a sunnier place, a calmer year — a town in Bavaria where the streets gleamed in late evening light and the bus drivers said “Servus” like you belonged there.
Regensburg.
There, time moved gently.
In Birmingham, time groaned.
The flat was technically “student accommodation,” which was another way of saying overpriced, under-loved, and under-heated.
I shared it with three others, none of whom I’d met before arrival.
The rooms were arranged like someone had drawn them in a rush — one slightly too large, one a converted storage unit with no real window, mine long and narrow like a train carriage with a single radiator that hissed in protest whenever it was asked to work.
The walls had once been white but now wore the greyish tint of too many seasons without repainting.
And the kitchen… the kitchen belonged to the ants.
They arrived sometime in October.
First, in small numbers — bold scouts crossing the windowsill like they had business to attend to.
By November, they had organized.
You couldn’t leave toast unattended.
Not for five minutes.
Not for two.
They didn’t just go for crumbs. They went for the whole slice, as if mocking the idea that this was your space and not theirs.
We tried everything: sprays, cinnamon, vinegar, sealing things in bags, sealing those bags inside other bags.
They came anyway.
Persistent. Tireless.
Like regret.
Every morning was a decision: make toast and stand guard, or just go without.
—
The flat was always cold.
Not in the romantic, blanket-wrapped, snowy-window sort of way.
Cold like your bones noticed.
Like you hesitated to take a shower because it meant leaving the only warm layer you had managed to create with your body heat.
The kind of cold where you’d boil water just to hold the mug.
Sometimes I’d sit at the little desk pressed against the wall, wrapped in my coat, typing half-sentences into a document that wouldn’t go anywhere. The window next to me let in more wind than light. You could hear the buses on Bristol Road before you saw them, brakes squealing like a child had been let loose on a trumpet.
Some nights, sirens echoed down the street.
Ambulances slicing through the dark.
I’d lie in bed and wonder who they were for.
Sometimes I imagined them coming for a version of myself that couldn’t quite manage.
I wasn’t sad exactly, just… fogged.
Like the kind of rain that falls sideways — gentle, but inescapable.
—
But for all that, it wasn’t a bad year.
Not really.
I made friends.
The kind you don’t keep forever, but who matter in that specific chapter.
We met in shared lectures and kitchen run-ins, in library corners where we were supposed to be writing essays but ended up whispering about everything else.
There was a girl from Manchester who could name every tree on campus. A guy from Cairo who always made too much pasta and left half of it in the communal fridge with notes that said “help yourself.”
We had movie nights in the common room, sitting on beanbags that felt like they’d been dragged through war.
Someone always brought cookies. Someone always forgot the plot halfway through and asked too many questions.
I laughed a lot that year.
More than I expected.
It surprised me — that laughter could survive so much mildew and mold.
But it did.
There’s one night I still remember with strange clarity.
It was February.
Cold.
We had lost power for some reason, and the whole block was dark.
Instead of complaining, we gathered in the hallway with flashlights and candles.
Someone played music through a speaker charged earlier in the day.
And we sat.
Four people who barely knew each other, wrapped in coats and scarves, telling stories as the wax puddled and the walls breathed.
I think I might have been happy.
I think I didn’t realize it at the time.
—
And that’s the part that stings, looking back.
Not the ants.
Not the damp.
Not even the awful electric shower that never worked right.
But that I didn’t enjoy it more.
I spent so much time waiting for it to get better,
telling myself it was a transitional year,
that real life would come afterward —
in the next flat, the next country, the next season.
But what if that was it?
What if that was real life?
The toast.
The hallway candles.
The Monday lectures and Wednesday beers and Sunday mornings where the light hit the carpet in a way that made you want to forgive everything.
—
What “Having It All” Means
Now, when someone asks me what it means to “have it all,” I don’t think of success or money or anything shiny.
I think of that cold kitchen.
I think of the moment when I stopped wanting it to be different.
Not because it was ideal —
but because, for a brief moment, I was fully inside it.
Not wishing it away.
Not measuring it.
Just… there.
And here’s the lesson I didn’t know then:
Not wanting something is just as good as having it.
Maybe even better.
Because once the wanting quiets down,
you start to notice what’s already in your hands.
And it’s always imperfect.
Always incomplete.
Always full of ants.
But it’s yours.
And sometimes, that’s everything.
life 