Yesterday we fixed my bicycle, swept the entrance to the house, pulled weeds up, had an impromptu barbecue.  In the jungle of knee-high, hip-high grass that’s blossomed in our garden, frogs leaped from blade to blade and the smoke dissapeared into the dusky blue.  From the garden pathway, looking away from the house, towards the sun dipping, the trees heavy with their summer leaves, this might be anywhere.  This might be miles away, no, worlds away from anywhere else.  An island of green and smoke; a paradise for the dispossessed.  Very Heart of Darkness, I say, only cheerier.

We still haven’t unpacked from Wales, though we’ve been back a week.  As if it’s summer now, so that’s okay.  Seasonal lethargy, the usual wanderlust of these months.

And it’s baseball season.  This has been as impossible to ignore, even from the cozy, television-free rooms of our East Oxford house, as it ever was when I lived so close to Fenway Park that I could hear the shouts of the fans from my bedroom (one summer the boom from a celebratory flyover left me thinking for an instant that a bomb had gone off somewhere).  But by baseball season, what I really mean is Red Sox season.  I’m starting to think that there’s an unspoken brotherhood of people who lived in Boston and left, who experience at this time of year variations on a strange but similar nostalgia for the hum of those first few games, concurrent with the first few really nice days of the season when everyone leaves their cramped and frigid apartments for the hills of the Boston Common and the people-watching on Newbury street.  Sudden throngs, bare-armed for the first time in months, stroll past shoestores full of sandals, gather en masse at JP Licks or Emack and Bolio’s.  Near Fenway they start selling “Yankees Suck” infant onesies and “Jeter sucks A Rod” t-shirts with great gusto, and the streets are littered not with patches of urine-stained snow but discarded flyers, programs, plastic cups.  In the thick evening air you can hear shouts of glee or of rage, see the white glow of stadium lights.  You can smell cheap beer and burgers, and suddenly all you want is a cheap beer and a burger, too.

I never liked baseball any more than a girl should.  I was restrained in my enthusiasm for it, sometimes bordering on apathetic.  But I confess to feeling a sort of elation, probably more tied to that which was human than that which was sport-related, when the Red Sox won their first world series in over 80 years.  I had moved to Boston only a few months previous, so my introduction to the city, really, was the crowds that took to the streets; when we beat the Yankees in the playoffs, subway cars filled with people yelling “Yankees Suck!” in almost military unison, and I still wonder if maybe the green line train didn’t make it to Kenmore on the power of excitement alone.  When they won it again a few years later you could actually taste a strange disappointment in the air; Red Sox fans, perhaps a little like England football fans, are attached to their suffering, and the win was too soon, they hadn’t had time yet to finish celebrating the 2004 victory, let alone settle into a rhythm of loss and frustration.  

I don’t follow the sport much now; but it follows me.  Casual references from other bloggers, on twitter, facebook, all the things that keep us weirdly connected to worlds we thought we’d left, remind me even on this rainy Oxford afternoon of what baseball season in Boston feels like.

And what, anyway, do I actually know about circuses? Nothing really. Once I read a book in which a girl and her brother, wounded in combat, limping, dour, soured by years in the trenches, visit the circus. Once I knew a girl who objected to circuses because of the animals. She didn’t say why and I didn’t ask. Once my parents went to see the Circ du Soleil, the circus in the sun, the circus made of human bodies, with some friends. They’re things I know only from the outside, circuses.

Coming down the hill that I cycled up hours earlier, my fingers turn to ten fat icicles, it feels. I no longer know when I’m squeezing my brakes. I arrive home and it hurts just to turn the lock in the door. The city is indecisive; is she playful, or cold and somber? Is she warm or is she still rapt in the throes of winter? Does she–and do we, by extension–miss her students, in this time of their absence, or is she reveling without them, a feather set free upon an April wind?

Impossible to tell, tonight.

After sandwiches which are too big for our mouths, we share a banana. I practise pouting my lips, the Facebook face, the look that other girls take on when posing for profile photos. I can’t plump them up enough without looking demented, descending into giggles. I give up and we watch more children, attracted by the mound of dirt. We watch the toddlers who have just learnt to walk careening down the path, thrilled by their own movements, unsteady but unwavering in gusto and intent. The Man says maybe I’m a little like that, too.
“I get the impression,” he says, “that at the age of about four, you decided you’d mastered all the basics, and from then on out you were just going to read.”

It’s more or less true, I say back. (Later, walking down the flat surface of the High street, I trip spontaneously. More true than less true, I think).

At the kissing gate by Merton college he traps me, kisses me sweetly.
“Is that because no one can see us?” I say.
“It’s because it’s a kissing gate, you moron,” he says. Kisses me again.

After we circle the city with our footsteps we come to settle at a bar on the High street where we sit close to the window, watching pink blossoms shuddering in wind. He reads the paper while I attack Essays in Love. There’s the strange sadness of a Sunday as the afternoon wilts into evening, as we move away from weekend papers, ipmromptu picnics in the garden, towards alarm clocks, early morning stresses, hours spent at work.

I look up every so often to make a different point about de Botton’s book. At the reference to Aristophanes, I balk.
“I find the idea that we’re all looking for someone who was once a part of ourselves really lonely,” I say. “Like, I want the person I love to be different. I want company.”
“I’m not sure that’s what that means,” he says. Whether he’s right or not I don’t know, but it highlights how differently we can read things. “It’s just about completion.”

A huge clock hangs from the cieling of the bar. It makes me feel both unwelcome and excessively desirous of staying all at the same time. The same way that being in a train station makes me feel. I know I’m in transition, but I could stay for hours, I think, watching everyone else, going somewhere else. Rhythms marked by a minute hand (is it coincidence, then, that the Man tells me this bar used to be a music store?).

Later, I finish Essays in Love in bed. I have read the entire book in a day and feel heavy with de Botton’s relationship woes. Sleep comes easy, and when it comes, it is quiet.

I know it sounds strange to say (and not a little unhealthy), but sometimes I like going for a run when I’m already a little thirsty. That way the cool air feels like something to drink. I am drinking the city, I like to think. (Then I self-consciously remember that line from Belle and Sebastian’s “Stars of Track and Field”: “You only did it so that you could wear your terry underwear and feel the city air run past your body.”)

After I got a stitch in my side running down Divinity Road I walked for a bit. It occurred to me that I need more walks in my life. (They wash the mind, clarify the thoughts, allow fully formed sentences to appear like ghosts in my head.)

Home again, I took the laundry down from the line outside. Earlier we ate bacon sandwiches in the garden. I don’t know if the Man did it just to humour me or not, but we sipped pineapple juice, and he read me an op-ed piece on Obama while I read him Tim Dowling at the supermarket checkout. At one point I laughed so hard I worried the bite I’d just taken would drop right out of my mouth. Now the dark has sagged over East Oxford. The kitchen is glowing yellow (the yellow walls make that happen, I think). My very muddy shoes are in the middle of the hallway, and my left leg is spotted with dirt. I think I’ll have a bath.

The city has emptied herself again, tipped the students out, and we see who is left. “The arselickers who stayed,” Philip Larkin called them (called us). But all I can think is that now that they are gone I will go to the Bodleian and get lost amongst the books.

Suddenly Monday nights are blank in a good way, they are quiet again, and as I glide wraithlike down the High street under eleven o’clock darkness there might be no one but me in all the city, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor, in his cloud of grease and chip smells, no one but me and the lonely kebab vendor and the ghosts crawling over the college walls, frolicking in the gardens while they can.

(The Man gets home late, I hear him undressing and the birds starting to wake simultaneously; he slips into bed beside me while the night is melting into morning, and our window is wide open).

I forget how still Jericho is. On Plantation Road I lean against the curb with my bicycle, so warm I’ve shed even my cardigan, and wait for a few minutes just to feel the sun and the stillness. Later a friend and I sit in the garden with a bottle of strong beer between us, chasing a pool of sunshine to the edge of the grass. It’s like a wilderness this far away from the house, hugging the brambles coming over the fence.

We talk of Africa. I haven’t been to Africa, I almost say, but the truth is that I have. I forget that I have; the Africa I’ve been to is smoky, spicy, sultry in the way I imagine the Middle East to be (but how would I know?). Not the Africa I used to dream about. But then, we all have different Africas, maybe; and I think about how complicated our relationship with place is, anyway, how much love and experience it takes to get to the root of it.

Later I meet the Man for a drink; we should go back to Fés soon, he says, apropos of nothing, nothing but the strange exhilaration which has overtaken everyone now that the weather is turning warm again. Is it really only the warmth, the clarity of light, that makes us believe in the glory of the future, the adventure of a summer, again?

Funny, I think.