The quiet creep of spring steals me from comfortable cold. My feelings abroad are impossible to fathom. I feel as if I peer through a pinhole, the entire galaxy enamoring and expanding before me. Yet the horizon condemns my little stretch of the cosmos to glaze of glass, a mere glimpse into a celestial storm through the eye of a needle. I have effaced myself to time, lost the ability to perceive its passing nor feel any consequence or burden of its perpetual continuity. Oxford blends into the fabric of my existence. The city is well-established in my routine of pedaling my bike through its narrow streets, wind whistling in my ears as I drown my mind in the unsteady crawl of Lana Del Ray. My weeks are marked by nose-burying in the pages of books, the ancient decay of pages haunting even my dreams. To learn so much and only discover how little you truly know is an awful paradox. Equally, I find it a sentence well-suited to my crimes. My ever-consuming greed to understand damns my curiosity with a perturbing color, like a death stain.
My life embodies transience. I constantly move. While time escapes me, space evades me. My mind is preoccupied by the prospect of adventure. A new place, a new face always underlies the opportunity to learn more, to consume and covet that which I so desperately want yet never truly grasp. The curling white marble and glass of Paris streets, the interplay of life and decay in Krakow, and the temple of bone nestled deep in Prague all beckon me as mausoleums to memory... they haunt me in the spaces between conscious and unconscious thought. They writhe and snake underneath every word I utter or ink.
Yet I must return home first. The idea fills me with dread. It contains the same connotations as the monomyth. Joseph Campbell encapsulates my crossing of the threshold: "The returning hero, to complete his adventure, must survive the impact of the world. Many failures attest to the difficulties of this life-affirmative threshold. The first problem of the returning hero is to accept as real, after an experience of the soul-satisfying vision of fulfillment, the passing joys and sorrows, banalities and noisy obscenities of life. Why re-enter such a world? Why attempt to make plausible, or even interesting, to men and women consumed with passion, the experience of transcendental bliss?"
I reject the title of hero categorically. I always imagined myself as a rather convenient villain. Yet the metaphor of the hero's journey remains. How can I survive the impact of the world? How can I attempt to even fathom, articulate, and convey an experience so wholly transcendent? How can I even begin to reconcile the object I was with the individual transcended, triumphant?
I fear that I, too, communed with the ghosts of Oxford. I have become my own mausoleum to memory. Dare I call it necromancy.
This reflects a creative communion of my fears of returning home. I will be in Colorado from March 15th to the 26th, 2020 before I return to the hallowed halls of Christ Church for my final trimester abroad. Please do not hesitate to reach out. I would love to reconcile and resurrect.
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