if it could only be like this always
I left Oxford today.
I don’t want to write as frequently as this. It’s been less than a week since I last wrote one of these, and I haven’t even left England yet. I am writing this from my parents’ house in Warwickshire, where I am pausing briefly before I fly out on Wednesday morning. Tomorrow my grandparents are coming to visit. Unless I’ve grossly miscalculated, I haven’t seen them since before I moved to Oxford — back in 2014, right before I told my parents I had changed my name.
I don’t think there are enough hours left in the night, or enough brain cells left off-duty in my skull, to explain how heavy all of this feels. What else am I writing these for, though, right? The least I can do is try.
After I graduated I came back to this same house with almost no ceremony. My parents and my sister and I slipped away early from the post-graduation festivities in college; we were all very tired and I did not have the luxury of an extra night in my final-year bedroom. My immune system gave out almost immediately, worn down by three years of straight emotional fatigue. I was functionally stuck to my childhood bed. Someone ought to explain the concept of subtlety to God.
I spent a good part of July in my aunt and uncle’s attic. My aunt and uncle, for the record, are great. They have a brewery and no truck with nonsense. My aunt, who knew me well enough to know that if I stayed in Warwickshire I would die a slow death, insisted that I job-hunt every day. Exhausted and directionless and still without medication for my suite of mental problems, I resented this ferociously — but she pushed, so I did it, and it got me a job. Sure, the job was in retail; sure, my mother had Concerns about it; but I found work, and the work was in Oxford, and so I had a reason to go.
My aunt subscribes to this newsletter now. I will reiterate: thank you, Sue, and I’m sorry I was such a horror about it all at the time.
Oxford was where my friends were. It was also, crucially, not where I had studied. It contained happy memories and the prospect of a future that I did not loathe. I found a room on the Abingdon Road, and a friend’s sofa to crash on in the meantime. I put myself on a train and arrived first thing on a rainy August morning, big awful suitcase (the same one I am taking to Canada) doing its best to tow me back down the hill where my friend lived. I remember that I sat for a while on the sofa that was my temporary home, trying to assimilate my new way of being. I had left. I was going to be all right.
I have clung to Oxford since. I left for two weeks in 2015 to do a horrible internship in London; the relief on returning was visceral. When you are new in Oxford, it’s like magic. I walked through Radcliffe Square one late summer morning and saw a butterfly land on a perfect flower, the RadCam gold and sunlit just behind; I felt acutely and urgently happy in a way I’d thought depression had eaten forever. You can last a long time on those fairytale moments. Even watching the buses come and go on Magdalen Street from the Waterstones ground floor till assumed a certain romance for a minute.
Of course none of that stuff lasts. It is romance in the medieval sense; it is a story you tell yourself about a place with a name and reputation. I also did the rounds of Oxford’s self-referral mental healthcare system three times, to consistently diminishing returns. I quit that first job when it became clear that I was the latest target of a capricious and vindictive management team. The temp job I had after that (in local government!! LMAO) fired me for being too mentally ill. I left my first houseshare in a state of high panic because my housemates, bewilderingly, were displeased that I liked to stay in my room. I spent my first year in town reliant on the largesse of friends every single time we went out. It is impossible to be seduced by the dreaming spires on the right side of Magdalen Bridge after you’ve walked home teary-eyed and desolate under the cold blank streetlights of Wood Farm. Even a windy day on the Cowley Road will leave you with at least a qualm or two.
Then again, so will time. Time is a very slow delivery system for qualms of all sorts. I lived in Oxford for eight years and it’s fucked up that I am writing this in the past tense.
By the time I left, I had started taking jobs that paid well. I was earning enough to rent a tiny, tiny studio flat in a nice part of town, and to pay for coffee and lunch when friends came to visit. I had savings, somehow. I could take the occasional holiday to Europe. It is hard, sitting here in my parents’ guest bedroom, not to worry that I’ve done something absolutely unhinged in dismantling that life and trading it in for a set of huge unknowns — but that’s time, too, isn’t it? I fly in two days’ time. The qualms were just about due to arrive.
When I was at Cambridge, I didn’t go home if I could help it. This was the right thing to do. Sure, it left me one of a handful of people in a huge stately home for some of the coldest, loneliest parts of the year; but it meant that I functionally had my own place, and if I needed to go to it, I usually could. It was a degree of independence that, even then, I knew I urgently needed — even then because I barely knew who I was when I lived there. Mainly I knew that I needed a life that was mine. The rest of it — the name, the gender — followed accordingly.
The whole time I lived in Oxford, I could count my visits home on one hand. We developed rules of engagement: my parents would come to me, and I would take them out to lunch. I have worked miserably hard to make that city sustainable for me, despite its well-documented insane cost of living. Every single time I left a job, I had to sit for a week or so with the fear that this was it — that I would have to go back, admit defeat, and claw my way into independence a second time.
Taking all of this into account, I am sure you can imagine that today’s combination of ‘coming back to my parents’ house’ and ‘relinquishing the keys to my flat’ was uniquely thrilling for the part of my brain that loves to panic and cry.
I said to Isaac: what if I fuck up Canada? What if I have to go back and there’s nowhere else to go?
He said: there will always be somewhere else to go, because I’ll always be here.
Oxford, I am sorry I didn’t say a proper goodbye. I should have taken one last walk through the Botanic Gardens, or sat for a while in the College chapel again. I took the bus over Magdalen Bridge just a week ago and I didn’t even think about it, not the way I used to when the view from the bridge was still new to me. I never meant to take you for granted. Today I closed the door on my flat for the last time and it looked so empty and small, and I remembered moving in — sitting in the alcove where I would put my bookshelf in the end, surrounded by bags I had hauled across town on the bus. I wish I’d managed one last run around the neighbourhood. I don’t suppose you ever get done saying goodbye to a place you have loved, in sickness and in health, in crying on the war memorial and in walking St Giles’ euphoric and sleepless at sunrise. Leaving is necessarily an imperfect process, never properly done the way you hope. You kept me safe. I’ll tell stories about you forever. Wherever else I go I will haunt bookshops and cafes, bus routes and train station platforms. Oxford, I will always be sitting on my bench and waiting for the sun to burn away the cloud, caught between places, wishing you were home.