Mastery
There is a spacelessness in the untraversed. The first half of a new walk always feels longer than its return. This is pleasurable during travel where a town passed through once remains a lasso of impressions strung together above scale, but spacelessness is less romantic when it will have to be tamed. Sequencing a new home —setting parts in relation —exhausts the attention. That is the tax on belonging.
My first degree was my first new city and I was too young to know that it would become smaller as each novelty was burned away. There, the buildings wore their landmarks inside out and every turning funnelled you down a sandstone wall, back to the origin. Cambridge is flat and light blue making it hard to burn away. No matter where you roam the dimensions run and coalesce. The roads lead out of town into flatlands or through town so softly that you find yourself on the other side, wondering if you’ve begun.
The English Faculty Induction Drinks
We see that there are many people here we could like. As graduate students, we know that there is something worth holding out for on the other side, that the city will offer friends and places where our future selves are already resting. As writers, as nearly everyone in this room would label themselves—although not here, never here—we feel very insecure about the value of what we want to say.
Every so often in the stream of introductions we might match the frequency of a stranger and begin the shared labour of making a first impression. Impatient with ourselves and our stranger we speak with contracted familiarity, each projecting the wealth of their character in as few, painless words as possible. Once the shared terseness finds motion it must not stop. Stopping would grant our stranger a breath in which they could excuse themselves to get more wine, only to be seen filling another’s glass across the room. Brits resort to a dryness that would be curt among childhood friends. If this person is meant to be a fixture of our other side they will follow as we plough through anecdotes and land askew.
We shunt between greetings and refills and only remember that the world is wider than this crowd each time it thickens with smokers driven in by the rain. Because of the nature of our shared study, everyone is keenly aware of what remains said and unsaid. Those who leave admit that they feel more solitary than they did on arrival. They are taken back by the streets that turn and return us.
“The art of losing isn’t hard to master” - Elizabeth Bishop (on starting an MPhil)
The Night ‘Before’
[Dusk on the 30th of September. Six women drink premium white wine around a kitchen island in the London borough of Haringey. The aunt prepares burrata, grilled peaches, pasta and profiteroles. The matriarch smokes in the doorway. The younger sister resists her Spanish homework. The remainder (three twenty-two-year-old blondes, previously known as the Girls of Girl Flat) make headway through the white wine as if it isn’t premium. They have been friends since the first day of Freshers’ Week, four long years ago]
EP(1): How are you feeling about Cambridge starting tomorrow? ET: hmm EP (2): What time’s your train? ET: hmm EP (1): Have you started the pre-reading? ET: hmm
[EP (1) and EP (2) look unimpressed by ET’s apathy. Due to the tardiness of Cambridge’s term, they are both well underway in their respective graduate studies of law and art. This makes them very jaded and worldly.]
ET: I’ll like the work, the city, the people. It’ll be good. EPx2: No new friends. ET: Well that’s just a bad attitu- EPx2: No New Friends.
