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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I dream I’m on the island again. I dream we never left. There’s Swahili coffee and still heat in the morning; wind and dust and the stickiness of salt in your hair in the afternoon. Over and over again. It was months ago that we left this place but it has wormed its way into my deepest consciousness. It’s not a love for the place, or a haunting, or a yearning–just that something about the clarity or perhaps the foreignness of the air on an island stays with you for a long time, maybe forever.

I grew up in a country that has very little sense of what it’s like to be on an island. The width of an entire continent is our playground, and the places we visit on holiday–Catalina, maybe, Martha’s Vineyard–are places detached from the mainland only in geographical terms.

So in my mind there’s a sort of lore about islands. Prospero is there always, throwing spells, glowering, remembering, conjuring. When I went to Greece I had been recently captivated by John Fowles, which maybe is why I was so ready to believe in a kind of magic. We hopped from one sunny, rocky, enchanted isle to another. The sky and the sea were so clear it was as if you could see right through the whole earth, the entire universe. The daytime heat and the incessant buzz of the cicadas at noon made the nights balmy, gentle by comparison (the beer helped too, I’m sure). Love became, like everything else, something transient–you could fall madly in love with anything or anybody without regard for consequence or reason, and the next morning the feelings might be erased. The only constant was a heady sort of beauty, which might, I suspect, be dangerous for any length of time–like being exposed to a poison–but we were only tourists, so we were fine. We went back to California. The madness faded, though the magic stayed under my skin for some time.

But now there is the volcano. I live on an island, but I had forgotten this until now. And suddenly, after one morning, I remember. We are floating in an ocean, isolated, confined. Everyone is conscious again of what technology had allowed us to ignore: our geography. The vastness of the earth is perceptible again.

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It’s a good night for walking home. The night that follows the first really truly warm day of the season: that’s always a good night for walking home.

In the streets around Summertown, everything is hushed and the lights are out in the houses, or maybe everybody has just drawn their curtains shut, and there are fallen blossoms under my boots. Even the cars as they slide down the road seem to be saying, shhhh. Be reverent, be gentle.

The warmth is fading a little but when the sun was out it got trapped under my coat, so maybe it’s stored up, and my limbs feel different.

On Broad Street the big issue seller suggests that if he can’t have my spare change, maybe he can have the yellow flower pinned to my coat. And why can’t he have my spare change, after all, I think? Because 20p is too little and 20 pounds too much, and that’s all I have in my pocket, and besides, yesterday I tipped a man in the bike shop £2 just for pumping my tires.

(In retrospect that seems backwards, but then, maybe not. I don’t want to feel guilty about my generosities. They’re too tiny as it is.)

And also, once I actually bought a Big Issue. I don’t know what came over me. I was exiting a shop and it was a bright sunny morning and I thought, well, okay, I guess you’ve got to do it eventually. But then I got to the office and couldn’t figure out what I should actually do with the magazine itself. Not read it, surely–it’s a symbol, not a consumable, a receipt, a badge. But I couldn’t throw it away either. That would be a true waste. So in the end I tucked it behind the scanner on my desk and then found it eight months later and went through the same process of thought before deciding that, actually, I could bin it, so I did, but not before I offered it to everyone else in the office. They politely declined and I think for half a moment as I dropped it in the recycling I felt a little fickle, as if I’d committed myself to this thing and now I was breaking my commitment. Why do we care about objects so suddenly and irrationally?

Three figures pass under the Bridge of Sighs. They look like shadows. Sitting outside the entrance to Hertford College is a young man in a red t-shirt crouched on the ground, flipping through a magazine, which is barely illuminated by the lamplight. A girl takes a photo of her friend; I hear her say, “that’s almost perfect, you know,” but there are so many things about which she could be talking about.

Speaking of almost perfect, I don’t suppose you could ever grow tired of Queen’s Lane. There’s that view of the back of All Souls and the windows of St. Edmund’s Hall and sometimes some music coming from somewhere (once, late at night as the Man and I were walking home, it was real proper jazz-age jazz played on a piano and I probably danced, a little bit).

On the High Street, the candy shop looks funny all asleep. You can’t see the colours of the candy and it’s like Willy Wonka dreamed in black and white.

In the end it’s a funny relief to be on the Cowley Road. Those North Oxford streets–they’re so beautiful, so big. It smelled heavenly up there, all pink and white blossoms. It was black and deserted and it would be easy to imagine yourself the only inhabitant of the entire area.

But here we have something else entirely. Chefs standing outside having their cigarette breaks. Girls in heels, shorts, and leather jackets (not even as sexy as it sounds, not even close). An ambulance, parked, lights flashing, no driver, outside a darkened house. An ice cream shop, a burger joint, a cinema, a chinese restaurant. A woman walking her dog with an open bottle of cider pressed to her lips. It all smells a bit greasy. I like it.

On James Street. Next to the pub where an open mic night is going on. I pause and peer inside just to make sure I know someone inside; I do; that’s good, I think. I won’t go in but at least I still belong. As I’m peering someone outside, smoking, recognizes me and we exchange a few words. Then I keep going, past the Conservative Club, out of which drips balding blokes and strange music.

Then our street. Always a little cramped, this street. Sometimes I can’t walk my bike on the pavement at all–how very unlike those wide North Oxford boulevards! And there, on the corner, is the house with the tall fence. Last summer I was thought the man who lived there was under house arrest because he used to stand next to that fence, eating his dinner or draping his arms over it and asking passers-by for a cigarette. Now I can’t imagine why I was so convinced of that. Harmless little house, harmless little man.

Our house, when I get there, smells of laundry. The curtains have not been drawn. The Man will come home from football soon. It’s one of those nights when I feel like it’s been an odyssey just to get from one end of the city to the other.

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Darkness eats away at the lamplight. It’s the time of morning when everything should be still. St. Pancras glows orange and looks like a gateway to somewhere warmer and brighter.

I love the Eurostar. I love the way it feels to be moving at that speed on a pre-determined route. But I sleep the whole way because we were up so late packing and then we had to get a midnight bus to London.

We don’t have much stuff. I mostly spend the weekend in the same outfit–a bright skirt, a blouse, a pair of sandals, making the most of the August heat–except one time when I think it’s going to rain so I don a pair of leather riding boots and then it turns out to be the hottest most glorious day of the whole trip. That is the day we walk to the top of Montmartre and have lunch at a little restaurant whose name I forget. We order salads–with meat, boiled egg, avocado, beetroot–and a carafe of wine and though we’ve spent most of the day’s allotted budget on the meal there is a happiness that comes over us. We finish the wine slowly, watching a girl in a red dress and heels alight from a vespa scooter. I don’t remember coming down from Montmarte particularly though I do remember that as we do we pass a painting of a donkey on a wall and also the Lapin Agile, which reminds me of the high school production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile I once saw. (It turns out I misremember this because when I go through my photos I discover that the painting is actually of a horse, and there’s a man on the horse, riding bareback)

I remember sleeping on the floor of a friend’s empty apartment. The mattress is torn and dirty, like something you’d find in a streetside skip. There’s a refrigerator in the middle of the room where we put our juice and our cheese. The shower head is collapsing and the bath stained with rust and other unimaginable things and I avoid washing for the whole weekend, making do with splashing my face and scrubbing under my armpits with water from the sink. That’s a nice way to be, for a time.

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