We have been, we are, travelling. We are in a state of travel. Dispossessed, half-asleep, gripped by other worlds (Moroccan spiced coffee, of which my bag now smells, and the distant Irish troubles of the 1920s, of which I have been reading), totally and utterly outside the moment and space we’re actually in.

We are however capable of looking towards the future: what will we have for dinner? Probably Chinese, or else pizza – and someone will deliver it swiftly and practically wordlessly to our house, and we will not say shokran, nor will the man who delivers our dinner expect anything, or see any disparity (class, colour, religion) between us and him. Our street will seem miraculously wide and the drunks exceptionally loud and we will for awhile miss (or at least unconsciously feel the lack of) the five calls to prayer, particularly the one just before dawn. Perhaps we will wake then, each of us, silently, without even knowing the other, too, is conscious of the quiet hour. We will hear the yelp of bicycle wheels or the moan of an errant car alarm, and then, comforted by this intrusion of noise, we will sleep again, through the dawn, too late, wake bathed in hot light, angry, minds elsewhere.

There is no possibility of jet-lag (no time difference, not that I was ever even vaguely aware of the time as we traipsed through the medina), but we will pretend that we’re travel-weary and in doing so, convince ourselves that we are travel-weary and jet-lagged after all, and people will know how to interpret the haze in our eyes, for we will say, ‘Oh yes, we’ve been in Morocco’. I despair of how that will sound – arrogant, perhaps? Though we hardly mean for it to.

It’s just that the way time moves alarms me. On the way to the airport, we say glibly that it hardly seems a week could possibly have passed since we were on the way to the medina, and I’m reminded of a dream I had shortly before we left, in which we departed and then suddenly I found myself returning, thinking, ‘but that was so quick, and we hardly did anything we said we would!’

Everything, really, is a variation of that dream – how else did I arrive at the age of 23, when just yesterday I was 20, and travelling back from Fés with a newfound lover, making lists in the back of my notebook of the furniture I would have to buy in order to furnish my apartment in Boston when I got back in September; and crying at the ending of John Connolly’s The Book of Lost Things, when really I meant to cry at my predicament, at the seeming impossibility of being parted by an ocean (not to mention a thousand yards of red tape, a thousand pounds, a thousand moments of yearning and wishing and resenting) from my love. Three years ago? No, that was three minutes ago, or else three centuries ago. We live always on dream-time, moving through molasses, or being propelled at the speed of light through our own experiences.

…and here we are now. Replicating the journey physically at least, though now I make no lists, because the house in Oxford is already full of our things (mostly our books), because I have a visa that makes my life there valid. “Oh September, where did you go?” is the refrain of the song I’m listening to, and oh how often I find myself thinking that! Without even knowing which September I mean. Perhaps I mean the first September I ever saw – how would I know? And what difference could it possibly make? It was September and now it is not and soon enough it will be again – this is an inevitable, unvarying truth. Leaves will fall again from the cherry trees in our garden and I will sit mournfully in my study and say, “Oh June, where did you go?” – wondering how the green could fade so fast.

Speaking of which, where did June go? For already it is July and Wimbledon is nearly over and soon our friends’ son will celebrate his first birthday, when this time last year he was only an idea, crouching in his mother’s body, a being who both did and did not exist as we took a break from our investigations into the life and writings of P.G. Wodehouse to eat cold fruit and watch the tennis, while outside on Plantation Road the elderly shuffled past, gasping in the heat, sweat forming in the ravines of their facial wrinkles. September indeed!

(Later I think how funny: for although we’ve been travelling all day, I am now inexplicably, unexpectedly, in England, at home, as if I had been moved like a chess piece from one place to another, as if the time and space between there and here had been erased.)

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I forget how quickly the medina eats away the hours of a day. At first it is morning, and then suddenly we are looking at the sky saying Oh, it’s eight o’clock (not that time matters much – it’s more that suddenly dinner becomes important, or sleep).

The sun has sunk now. We’re all on the terrace, even the dogs, who are fickle in their attentions, though lovingly so – as if, I think, they are trying to distribute themselves evenly among us, so that none of us is disappointed for long by the lack of dog’s head in lap.

Last night I went out and took photographs of the minaret near Ali and Alice’s house in the moonlight. The darkness here is characterized by light. The religious symbolism of this does not entirely escape me – at a christening last week in Christ Church cathedral, we were asked to help the baby walk always in light – but I find it difficult just now to articulate it precisely. It is like this: even at night the minarets seem to be illuminated, whether or not they actually are. The one near Ali and Alice’s house is abandoned and silent, but still it shines.

I don’t mean magic exactly. (Though at dinner, Ali tells us of the magic here, and I cannot help but trust him – he’s from here, he knows, his confidence is contagious). I mean that we see the minarets, the city itself, always bathed in light, even at the cold hour of midnight. Awoken at 5 am by the resounding calls to prayer, the day seems already to have begun, even if the sun has not yet lifted its hot, heavy self over the Eastern horizon.

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It’s nearly midnight but something about the quality of light puts me in mind of an earlier hour. It doesn’t feel fully dark yet. Perhaps it’s the warmth. My espadrilles make no noise on the walk home. I can see the flashes of people’s televisions, a few late night conversations over bottles of wine. Everyone seems civilised and subdued. Hush, says the moon, and we obey. The pubs are shut.

In the mirror I’m startled to realise that the brightness in my cheeks is actually sunburn; I’ve caught the sun today, somewhere on my walks from town and back, to a friend’s place for dinner where we sat in pools of twilight, candles staining our eyes with bright spots.

I wear a floral print dress. It’s ’40s, almost-frumpy, which fits my mood. My hair is messy. The glamour is in the not-glamour, or so I tell myself. The slightly sunburnt nose; I could get used to the way this weather makes me feel.

Last night was the summer solstice. A year ago I was with my mother in Bath. This year we celebrated, without meaning to, by listening to Stornoway in a hot, cramped upstairs room. They sang:

Oh and it’s a Monday night in June
And I should be sleeping
But it’s so damn warm inside
I’m in the garden dreaming

It was a Monday night in June. I should have been sleeping. It was so warm inside. And after, we lay dreaming with the window open.

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Let’s get one thing straight. I’m not complaining. Voting is one area where there really is – and should be – a difference between where you come from and where you are. But this week I have felt acutely the strangeness of my situation, which is that I can influence minute local elections in California (I haven’t been in California for two years) but cannot cast a vote here, where I live now.

It’s good to feel this powerless. I forget not to take things – like democracy, for instance – for granted. I have strong opinions about the general election in the UK. But I’m a child again, watching the adults make the decisions. More than that, I have the sense that I’m witnessing an intimate moment that I shouldn’t see. I’m an American voyeur, peering into the British bedroom, watching the politicians strip their clothes off, bare their fists. Watching the people do the same.

This is not the same thing has having no say. I still have a voice. I simply don’t have the right to tick a box. That box makes a world of difference to me, but the freedoms I enjoy would make a world of difference to much of the rest of the world. I know that. I also know that I made the choice to live here.

And I believe this is just, that my own powerlessness is deserved. But I would be lying if I told you that on Thursday, I didn’t feel just the tiniest bit of resentment. In the morning, reading other people’s accounts of stepping into voting booths, my eyes welled up. I always get a bit like that about elections, but this time there was something else. This was not pure love for the democratic system, or a thrill at seeing it in action. There was a sadness, too. Voting brings people together. There’s a whole community out there this week – a whole country – that I’m not a part of and never can be.

There’s something else, too. There’s anger, I think. This is more irrational. But it has to do with the sense that it had just got started. They didn’t left enough time for us to process everything, let alone decide (I say “we” but I mean “them” – and that’s at the heart of it, I hate that there’s a “them” again, just when I was getting used to it being “us”). This election only really kicked off a few weeks ago; where I’m from elections last years. And that can be exhausting, but it’s what I’m used to.

Here, they’re analysts. I’ve watched my friends and my colleagues suddenly become mathematicians, statisticians, logic-minded advocates. They understand marginal seats and tactical voting but there’s not that same idealistic sense of individual power.

What I keep thinking, really, is this: that I may not have a vote but I still have a voice, and how could I have used it? Why didn’t I use it? My own ignorance left me feeling bound and gagged for too long and now suddenly here we are, and the time for action has passed.

I remember going to a rally for a popular gubernatorial candidate in Boston once. A friend of mine, another politics student, met me outside the Hynes Convention Center and we smiled our way past the security and up into the balcony, where we watched the candidate make a rousing speech. It was raining confetti. Oh, it was a spectacle. It was empty. The fact that this man could rally such an enthusiastic crowd says nothing about his qualifications to lead a state. But it felt good, and now I know why: it felt good because I was a part of it. Because the following week I could go out and make my decision, and have that mean something.

So my challenge now is to learn how to make my voice feel more like a vote; to learn how to translate opinion into action in new ways. And maybe, too, I should consider what I said at the start of this post – that this is one area in which it really does matter where you come from, where you’re registered. That sounds so clinical – to say that I’m registered to vote in California and therefore that’s where I should be voting – but maybe it’s only because I’ve forgotten, over the last few years, how important it is to feel involved.

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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.

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