We shall not cease from exploration, and the end of all our exploring will be to arrive where we started and know the place for the first time – T.S. Eliot

I want to say that I don’t believe in fate. Coincidence, maybe. Yes, I’ll accept coincidence–this happened and so did this, what a coincidence. But then in a certain light, from a certain angle, things start to look ridiculous and too improbable. There’s that whole funny thing about me meeting a man–the man–my first day in Oxford, and then it gets even funnier when you learn that before me there was another American girl called Miranda with the same initials who studied the same things in college and it’s almost as if we were literally meant to be and maybe he’d got the wrong one the first time round–but really, who believes that? I don’t believe that. I’d like to, but actually what I believe is that we happened one night to meet in a pub and we got along. And later it turned out that he happened to once have had a girlfriend who shared my name and initials and nationality. Maybe it says a lot about him—that he’s consistent, that he has a type–but more likely that’s just the way things are.

But then this: this street. This street that I’ve been working on for more than two years. In my life, my twenty-something life, that’s a lot. I’ve held this job longer than I’ve ever held another and now I’m leaving it. It was not an arbitrary appointment, either–no more than anything else is arbitrary. Because it’s where he went to school (and also where she–the other Miranda–went to school). Because he had good things to say about it, I applied for a job there. You can’t even say I applied for a job there. More like: I wrote a desperate email and they responded saying yes, what a coincidence, we do have an opening, would you be available for an interview next week?

And that street. What a funny street. Tucked away in North Oxford where I would never ordinarily go. Except that I did go there. My first week in Oxford, three years ago, long before I was hired. Because just around the corner is where my tutor’s house was. And we would sit and drink tea and discuss the political history of the situation in Iraq.

And then it turns out that Pico Iyer went to school just down the road. The Dragon School. Once I had to go there to deliver some errant post. Pico Iyer has been one of my favourite writers for a long time and I’ve always felt this stupid sense of connection–because he lived in Santa Barbara, where I’m from, because he was schooled in Oxford, where I love–and then to think that he walked down this street where I have spent five days a week for more than 728 days. Well, that’s funny enough.

Then tonight. Arbitrarily, because if you remember this is all arbitrary–I look up the name of an author I once wrote an email to. I’d loved a book of his and I had a question–who knows what it was, I was in high school–and he wrote back within hours and I thought it was the nicest thing anyone had ever done for me. I remembered his name tonight, for no good reason at all. It popped into my head as I watched an episode of Dr. Who so I typed it into my computer and pressed “search”. And you know what? Paul Watkins went to the Dragon School too.

How do I express the strangeness of this? I can’t tell him–can’t say, retrospectively, I’m writing to you and in ten years I will share a very specific geography with you . I don’t write it to him now, because the time has passed for that sort of thing. I wouldn’t write to him now, I couldn’t, because I am an author too, and the letter would be tainted by that–no longer an innocent high school girl seeking advice and giving praise, but a bloodsucking competitor trying to network. And yet–

And yet–

And yet here we are. We share a street. We have that street in common. You know who else lives there? Roger Bannister. Who was the first man ever to run a sub-four-minute-mile. 3′ 59.4″. And my first year in high school that was the name of my favourite album–Four Minute Mile by the Get Up Kids, who, if I listen to them now, sound like noise and nothing else and I feel very little except for some obligatory and very vague nostalgia. I used to listen to that noise coming through headphones every night. Four minute mile and Roger Bannister, and I played with the idea of being a track star myself and I listened to Belle and Sebastian and thought idly, though I never imagined it would ever actually happen, that when I was free of the shackles of high school I would move to Britain and set up a life there which was a million miles away from where I knew, and it would be good–

–And it is good, and feels spontaneous. But then if you really look, everything points to it. Everything points to that one damn road–the road where I’ve spent hours making photocopies, constructing files, answering phones–I share a knowledge of that road with other people–and maybe Four Minute Mile wasn’t so much about the noise but about something else.

But then I don’t believe in all that, do I? Do I? On nights like this I’m tempted to say yes. Yes I do.

And that’s the magic of it–that you never know. All the signs point to this–whatever this is. This moment in East Oxford with the ever-evolving draft of my first book in a special folder on my desktop and the knowledge of that road with the Dragon School at the end, and the man who sleeps beside me every night with his heavy breath and his soft beard. But the signs could point anywhere if I wanted them to. It’s like that film Pi where you start to see 3.14 everywhere, and the more you think about it the more it appears in obscure places. It takes over your everyday life.

And here is everyday life. Early mornings, muesli drenched in organic milk from the farmer’s market. Cups of tea and pints of cheap cider. Kisses across the table. A street, another street, another, all the way to and from work. A bicycle locked up in various places all across the city. Everything is arbitrary. You love every minute. Things shift at the back of your mind–maybe this was meant to happen, maybe this just happened, but definitely it doesn’t matter which. You curl up with the window open and the duvet up against your chin and a warm body beside you. Never mind all that. This is now.

❧

I’ve written about this before, but a blog post I read earlier today made me think of it again.

It’s to do with Javier Marias’ All Souls–a book which I selfishly maintain paints one of the most stunningly accurate portraits of Oxford I’ve ever come across. It’s not about the city; it’s about my city. And here’s why: his narrator and I share a space. We both inhabit a world where, “there’s no one here who knew me as a…child.”

And I almost can’t tell you what that means, because it means so much. It is, stripped of context, what it means to live somewhere else. It means that when you meet friends for a drink and you look back, through the cider haze, what you see and what they see exist in parallel universes. This is the lonely side of it.

The happy side of it is that sometimes, just walking down Broad Street or cycling past the gaze of idle pedestrians, you have the strangest feeling: you’ve become weightless, your skin translucent like a fish, your mind lucid. Time overlaps with itself; Georgian architecture with Classical and Norman, Wren, Wolsey, Aldrich, a collage of names and periods. And your name? Unknown. You float down Turl Street, past the mouths of three colleges, each one guarded by a stiff porter in bowler who watches you without interest, who has seen a thousand just as young, and as possessed with the charm, beauty, and blamelessness of this youth, as you are. Oh, but this is freedom. Terrible, beautiful freedom. You are separated from your own history and yet at one with it. You can be things, where everyone around you must pretend.

So you become like a candle: self-contained, brief. I feel abbreviated here, and if I didn’t enjoy that feeling, I wouldn’t have stayed. It’s been nearly three years, and I can still pinpoint the moment at which I shed my history–which is full of wonderful things, ranches, farms, children, family, laughter, freshly picked fruit, waves and hills, sunkissed cheeks, but also of anxiety, selfishness, selflessness, a paralyzing shyness and a destructive self-pity. But then one day in May I stood in Christ Church Meadow and watched some little boys in stained cricket whites jogging across a field and thought: I’m not my past, my past is me. And then– is it coincidence?–that night, I was free and light enough to appreciate an encounter that could have been as tiny as an atom in my memory, and now here I am and that encounter is sitting across from me, and our past begins at the point where I felt for an instant that I had no past.

No one here knew me as a child. It’s the greatest blessing and also the greatest curse you could possibly imagine.

❧

Is it better or worse to be young in a depression?  It seems unfair.  Here we are in the golden time, all bright-eyed, muscled, sharp of mind and full of ambition, stymied (they say) by a nonexistent job market and an economy made of dust and dreams gone bad.  Aren’t things hard enough–haven’t they always been hard enough?  Shouldn’t I resent the fact that I’m meeting economical adversity at every corner, that it’s no longer about glory but about staying alive?

Except that I hardly notice there’s a recession on.  I was always bound to be poor at this stage of my life.  I’m a student and a writer with an allergy to the kind of ambition that lands you prematurely in a London high-rise, rising at 5, only at home in a suit.  We could be experiencing the biggest economic boom of the last 100 years and I’d still be seated in my humble study writing for free, living off tea, love, the kindness of others, and a patchy income that falls somewhere below the poverty line.  And I’ll tell you what else.  I’d rather be struggling now, rationing extravagance and soothing myself with cheap cider, than struggling later, with a family, maybe, a career to worry over, a house, roots stretched tight.

Strange to say, but we may be lucky after all, to experience the relative poverty of youth alongside the actual poverty of this downturn, recession, depression, whatever it turns out to be.  The manor house can wait.

❧

Two years ago today I arrived in Oxford.  I can still recapture the feeling in my breast—not the feeling upon arrival, but the feeling an hour after, walking from Jericho towards town.  I retraced the line that the taxi had taken, made my way towards Christ Church Meadow, where girls in summer dresses were sunbathing, and boys lay reading in the shade.  The first really glorious day of the season, I’d heard.  The sky certainly looked the part, all Mediterranean azure blue.  The feeling I had was what I can only describe as freedom: independent, and as yet unfettered by human ties, memory, history.  This day could have been my first on Earth, if I’d wanted it to be.  The girls in their sundresses specters; watching me, envying me as I envied them.  The tourists (and already I felt separate from them, I was separate in that moment from everyone, and also strangely open to them, connected through my separateness) taking photos, posing before the great stone face of Christ Church, lounging on the walkways, resting on benches.  A jogger or two, passing me by.  There I was: someone with no past and no future, no childhood, no family, no education, no knowledge, really.  And what happened after was not so much a reinvention as a distillation.
I made my way across the city; how imposing she was, how beautiful under the sunlight, how golden her stones and welcoming her gardens!  It was the first and only day in my life, perhaps, that I had not known what would happen: not known where I would be five minutes from now, even—for we cannot predict our movements in a new geography.  Now, I would not go back to that feeling willingly, but then, it was perfect, and with everything I did, everything I saw, I was building my own world.

We met, of course, at a pub; if you were going to write a story for yourself, whereby you came to Oxford and fell madly in love, would you choose any other meeting-place than an old tucked-away tavern, with low ceilings, strong cider?  Hidden from the street.  Only accessible by two alleyways.  There I turned to him and we spoke for the first time.  My coming to Oxford is synonymous with my falling in love.  No way to separate the two; and why would you want to?

The night was long, and full of shadows.  Past the Radcliffe Camera, viewed for the first time under a midnight sky.  The smell of books wafting up through the grates.  We wound up, he and I, at a dingy bar off the High Street, where we have never since been, where I kissed him, or he kissed me, and in that moment of kissing, the freedom was lost forever, but in its place something better, something stronger, grew.  No longer was I untied to this place, history-less, loveless, separate, alone.  It was me and I was it.  You cannot foresee something like that at the time, of course, but you can just begin to feel the edges of it.  You can think, as you wake in a strange bed the next morning, to another blue sky, another day full of golden-stoned structures, that something is happening that you are powerless to predict or prevent, but then you simply forget it, let it happen, because the way that he offers you his phone number on the envelope of an old electricity bill, the way that he kisses you just before you get on your first Oxford bus, take your first trip as someone who belongs here, dissolves all else.

To think in two years I have seen hundreds of Oxford days, each one of them taking me further away from that moment of arrival.  To think that we have shared hundreds of Oxford days.  That to mark this day, this anniversary, I take the day off work, we go to the pub at midday and share a drink.  We let the time slip away from us completely; have bacon sandwiches in the afternoon, repose in the lounge.  The day covered by bright grey clouds.  In the evening we get on a train; this is an ordinary day, an extraordinary one.

❧

Fés, Summer, 2007

From the bruised-sky countenance of an English summer (three hot days and a thunderstorm) we fly south; we are young.

At Bab Boujaloud, the blue-green gate, we look up, eyes hot, sweating diamonds onto a street paved with dust. Hey, Bob Dylan! Ali Baba! Nice girl! (I like being your nice girl, while you, today, are all shaggy brown hair, beard, sunglasses).

I like it when you speak French, when you say shokran, when you sit for hours, beneath a lamp, sketching its lace form, each precise indent, measuring with your eyes. You are intimate with it; I want to ask how these things are done, but the silence is all that keeps us cool.

Kif? We watch the owner of the café, carefully rolling, with stained and heavy hands, a joint. Kif? He says. Then I lose track; we swim home through Fauvist paint (even you look made of blue and green now). We follow sex with a nap, wake with eyes ringed red to dancing music. Listen to that, you say. (Perfect bliss).

In sudden palaces, children play, women scrub the smell of decay, the rot of orange blossoms from the floor. The tiles arranged with surgical symmetry (mathematics by color). We spend our days walking imperfect circles around the riads, the minarets, the medersas. We spend our nights too hot to touch.

Mornings made of honey and a single cube of sugar dissolved in the ocean of your coffee. I prefer mint, hot, sweet, so you teach me to tie a paper napkin round the glass because it was something you learned, once. I read the guidebook to you: It seems to exist suspended in time.

Even the shadows are still.

❧