rebirth
I took the long weekend off from writing to you, because I’m tired. It is insane that I should be tired right now. I’ve done almost nothing for the duration of the bank holiday; I took daily naps; I didn’t go outside once. It reminds me of nothing so much as my first term in Cambridge, exhausted on a constant by the newness and strangeness of everything about my existence. I think about babies, who can’t be awake for too long without growing overwhelmed by all the unfathomed stimuli of the world around them. They need downtime to assimilate reality or they scream and scream and scream. Experiencing trauma: it’s like rebirth, if rebirth were terrible, if you weren’t small or cute enough for anyone to excuse your oversleeping.
This all sounds terribly bleak. The fact is that I am doing okay. I am speaking to my therapist weekly by phone, and the breeze that comes in through my single window is pleasantly cool these days. Last night, the friend I hadn’t heard from called me; they are back in town, where they arrived shortly after the government advised against inessential travel, and living in their girlfriend’s flat. They’re safe. All of my friends, thus far, are safe — it’s reassuring to think of them out there, living their lives, for the most part not too far away.
I remember moving to Oxford, in August of 2014. I spent the first few weeks crashing on the sofa of someone who has since unfriended me on Facebook, giddy with the thrill of being gone. I had a week or so between arriving and beginning in my job as a bookseller, and I used it on wandering around, learning the buses, finding space for myself in the city I had decided would become my new home.
People asked me why I’d chosen to move to the city, and I gave them the honest answer: my friends were here. Throughout the better part of my degree, I had treasured every visit to Oxford: every weekend spent in a friend’s dubious sublet, every baklava brunch at the Lebanese delicatessen, every interstitial moment between moments on a peeling wooden bench with a book. It was good to have a place to go that wasn’t where the essays were, or the untouched reading lists. I had room to be a whole person, when I came down on the X5 coach for a friend’s birthday party, when we drank elaborate cocktails in the Grand Cafe and stayed up dancing until 5am; I didn’t have that room in Cambridge, and I didn’t have it in my hometown. It was a feeling I wanted to chase, newly-graduated in my childhood bedroom and trying to breathe through the psychic toll of the last three years. If I hadn’t been able to afford to stop and recover back in Cambridge, then I couldn’t afford it any more readily at home. I needed someplace mine. So I followed the people who loved me. It was, objectively, a very stupid decision, which you will understand if you have ever tried to pay London-tier rent on a minimum wage; but it was the best stupid decision I’ve ever made.
It’s not 2014 anymore, and the group of friends I followed here has been disparate for a while. People have married each other, moved away, come back, moved away again. Gill’s working holiday visa ran out, and she moved back to Australia. Arkady’s degree course ended, and she moved back to the USA. Talitha moved back to Cambridge to take a new job. I lived with Ash, then with Frances and Morgan; now I live alone. Kassie and Maz moved into their house, and Gill flew back for a fortnight to join us for the wedding, where Matt namedropped Metal Gear Solid in his best man speech, and Tamsyn told me firmly that the man I was into at the time did not under any circumstances deserve me (and was, as usual, correct).
I am used to my relationships being disparate. I’ve been dating long-distance for as long as I’ve been dating; my friendships have been long-distance for longer even than that.
Still. More of the people I love are in my city right now than they have been in a while, and it reassures me. I live alone because I like to be alone, most of the time, but I can’t help feeling a little bereft when it ceases to be a matter of choice. Even when I can’t take the bus across town to see them, it’s a matter of great comfort to me that Kassie and Maz are still in their house, with their cat; or that Frances is back in the city after nearly a year away. I don’t know what Oxford would mean to me if I had come here alone, with nobody waiting; I don’t know where I would have gone instead. For all I am mourning my own plans to leave, which are almost certain now to be delayed, I am finding myself newly grateful for the place I ended up, which has been good to me, and where I know I am safe.
Nobody needs to forgive me for oversleeping, here. I hope you find such a place for yourself when you need it.
W