Back in my grandma's bed

And so my second Michaelmas ends.

This morning I packed to a frenzy of 'Oh Wonder' songs, stepped out of Buck House to print my tickets to Munich. I lay on the empty floor for a while, how strange to see bare walls again after 8 weeks - they were furnished in a frenzy when I felt like I had too much noise in my head. Then I decided to go for a last run to west cambridge, a route I don't usually go to.

I remembered why I avoid it halfway through running in the fields, when I realised that my shoes were caked in mud, the sort that sticks and forms another layer, like clay. I snapped off some of that brittle grass that grows in the hedgerows to poke some of the mud out, accidentally poking a splinter into my finger at the same time. It came out smoothly, a small pink dot was all that was left of that part of the world that had somehow found its way under my skin.

(Writing that sentence made my heart lurch strangely, and I don't want to think why)

I also thought perhaps the strange clay-like mud might be manure ('Horse poo is - out of the different sorts of poo you can get - some of the cleanest,' says Alex) and in that strange field-upon-field place, where I could see the cars in the distance but not hear them, not hear anything but the wind and my skin, I said loudly to no one, to the wind, to my skin 'This might be horse poo.'

I met Alex in the kitchen, where I tried to finish up my scraps, she finished her curry and I thought of how we'd attacked each other with the water gun from the christmas cracker we shared last night. We agreed on a walk after lunch, which ended up on castle mound.

Emily wrote in the book she gave me that she hoped I would find a quiet place for myself, and in first year castle mound was that quiet place, discovered during a hiatus from running when my feet were sore, a place I could be removed and yet I-the-world's-eye watch Cambridge from above, picking out King's Chapel, St John's Chapel, Jesus Green, the Library. This time Alex came too, and I stood with the wind whipping my hair out of its tucked-in place in my jumper as she walked around me, and said this was one of those unremarkable moments that somehow never becomes forgotten.

My new quiet space is the snaking paths behind the playing field in Girton village, the leaf meal covered forest paths that go between silver birches and apple trees and then emerge onto the wide open field from which the sky always seems more vast.

Back in college, I moved the boxes and cases nearer my door but not quite out yet, and then leaned there talking to Alex. She took a picture of me on her film camera and then I brought everything down just as Uncle John arrived, and we drove back to Ixworth.

I looked up at the moon and it was just a sliver of a crescent - so far from the supermoon I threw open my bedroom window to look at weeks ago.

My writing shall go somewhat backwards and un-chronologically from here, an ebb here and a flow there, information and stories told and retold and so some of their edges will be roughened or softened, scratched smooth by time.

“Let us again pretend that life is a solid substance, shaped like a globe, which we turn about in our fingers. Let us pretend that we can make out a plain and logical story, so that when one matter is despatched—love for instance—we go on, in an orderly manner, to the next. ” 
― Virginia Woolf, The Waves