the end of beginning

It is wonderful and heartbreaking how much a city can come to mean to you. I moved to Oxford a week after my 18th birthday, shit scared, and trying very hard to pretend not to be. I can still smell the must of the horrible 1960s college room I moved into. It came complete with a splintered cupboard door, broken lightbulb, and mixed-gender bathroom I shared with nine others. It did not assuage my fear.

The city felt foreign then. I could feel the presence of the many thousands of impressive souls who had passed through on their path to do great things. I sensed their eyes looking down at me from portraits hanging on hardwood panelled walls while I ate beans on toast and formed awkward friendships during freshers’ week. It was hard to imagine that I could ever feel at home in a place which already held so many stories.

Almost ten years later, I am finally trying to say goodbye to it. Oxford is a small city: it holds around 165,000 inhabitants, barely a city by some people’s standards. And it is as beautiful as the pictures make it look. It’s very easy to fall in love with such a place, and I’ve seen people visit for a few days and feel like they’re leaving a little piece of themself behind when they go. When you spend a decade in Oxford, you get to know it very well. Its streets and winding passageways are the lines on the wrinkled hand of an old friend, deep and worn and familiar.

And those streets hold so many memories. This week I felt a little overwhelmed by them. The stone steps outside University College, where I sat at the end of a chaotic undergrad night out, half a bottle of wine in and trying to recover with friends over greasy chips from a food van. The bend in the river where I jumped in after my first set of (slightly catastrophic) university exams, going into cold shock and coming out smelling of goose. The cafes that became my go-to spots for most of my PhD, where I’d have comforting small talk with baristas before locking into writing for the day. The pub where my partner and I had our first date almost five years ago. These places were the building blocks of my young adult life.

Some of my worst memories are held by Oxford’s streets too. It would be nice if I had a neat, romantic story about how I fell in love with the place; about how 18-year-old me felt the fear slip away to easy confidence, how she made the best memories of her life and found her path. In such a story, the moderate adversity of an intense undergraduate degree and some health challenges could provide some conflict and rising action for the narrative arc, culminating neatly in the PhD as an inspiring and heart-warming resolution.

But, of course, life does not feel that way. It feels much messier. I won’t delve into the worst bits (I have complicated feelings about farming such experiences for online engagement, and think the way algorithms incentivise us to do so is… not good), but they certainly don’t feel like plot points that have been wrapped up neatly. Many of them are things I’m still working through, and probably will be for a long time. Beyond that, it would feel a little patronising to my younger self to write about her like some naive character about to set out on a quest and frame my current self as the infinitely wiser one at the end of the journey.

Oxford’s streets no longer feel full of the people who walked them before me. Instead, I’m crowded by the versions of myself I grew into and out of while living there.

There’s a temptation to reminisce on these past versions; to laugh, albeit affectionately, at how much they still had to learn, or the choices they made which now seem completely baffling.

But really, those ten years aren’t bookmarked by sudden shifts from young to not-young, from naive to wise, from immature to mature. Rather, I see a thousand versions of myself, in constant flux. And I’m still in that constant flux.

In looking back, I also find myself looking forward. I try to think of myself in ten, twenty, fifty years. What will that version of me think of her 28-year-old self? Which places will have come to feel like home, full of complicated memories and versions of future me? It feels like a mistake to think that I’ll ever feel like a finished version of myself. I certainly don’t now.

Last week in Oxford I found myself hungry, and couldn’t for the life of me think of anywhere to buy some lunch. I stood on Cornmarket Street as hordes of tourists moved around me, my mind blank as I tried to decide. It hit me hard in the chest in that moment: Oxford is no longer home. It’s beautiful, and familiar, and largely unchanged, but it’s no longer the place where such small decisions feel automatic. Since moving away 9 months ago, I’ve already begun to evolve into new versions of myself.

The first versions of my adult self not held by the safety of Oxford’s streets. I feel excited to continue to meet them.