My Oxford Year

by Julia Whelan

Reading poetry is a conversation of feeling between two people. It shouldn’t answer anything, it should only create more questions, like any good conversation.

“Not having your heart broken and not being a prude aren’t the same thing, are they?”

When you feel more than you can say, when words fail you, when syntax and grammar and well-constructed expressions are choked from your mind and all that’s left is raw feeling, a few broken words come forth. I’d like to believe those words, when everything’s stripped away, might be the key to it all. The meaning of life.

Your gypsy soul did beckon To my fetid heart and made A fearful conflagration of The meanest kind to tame. “Fragment,” Unknown

You have been mine before,— How long ago I may not know: But just when at that swallow’s soar Your neck turned so, Some veil did fall,—I knew it all of yore. Dante Gabriel Rossetti, “Sudden Light,” 1863

I love to dance. Ever since I was a kid. It was therapeutic. Why did I stop? I used to dance every day after school. Put on the radio and just go to town. When did I become the serious adult who runs five miles a day instead of dancing by herself in her own damn apartment?

No other man Can know a man Such as this. For a woman knows a man In ways a man Knows not exist. Ay, she knows her man, Such as he is. Unknown

We assess each other, these people we thought we knew.

Maybe, once you come to realize that there are no answers, you learn to live with the questions.

It’s a funny thing, clocking the moment your life changes forever while it’s happening. Usually a moment’s significance only matters in retrospect. Seeing the exit you meant to take in the rearview mirror, that sort of thing. Not this time.

We may be timeless, but something tells me this room hasn’t seen many women on top.

‘Love well those who are dying, so that they may die in love.’ In all my sadness and grief, that gave me comfort. How fortunate I was to have had that time with Oliver.” Antonia turns her eyes to me. I know she’s thinking about my father.

Because I’m leaving in June. Because he knows this is my last chance to travel like I’ve always wanted to. Because he knows that he can’t go and he won’t be responsible for holding me back. Because he loves me more than he wants to spend what remains of our time with me. What do you do with that kind of love?

Think of me as withdrawn into the dimness, Yours still, you mine; remember all the best Of our past moments, and forget the rest; And so, to where I wait, come gently on. William Allingham, “Untitled,” 1890

Losing someone is hard enough. But death without the process of dying is an abomination. It takes nine months to create life; it feels unnatural, a sin against nature, that the reverse shouldn’t also have its time. Time to let go of the known as we take hold of the unknown.

Maybe in this, an Oxenford can be shared. Maybe it’s not just for the person crossing the river, but also for those left on the bank. Looking into a loved one’s eyes, seeing the knowing there, the inevitability, and telling them, I love you. My love is with you to your end; yours will be with me until mine. Because the love doesn’t die, does it?

It turns out, the act of making a choice, of choosing a path, doesn’t mean the other path disappears. It just means that it will forever run parallel to the one you’re on. It means you have to live with knowing what you gave up. Which isn’t a bad thing; if anything, it only serves to strengthen my resolve.

It occurs to me now, in this blisteringly cold hospital car park on the outskirts of Glasgow, Scotland, that being called upon to do something because you’re good at it is not the same thing as having a calling.

Maybe my dream of Oxford, the planning, the career building, the Rhodes, everything that went into getting me there was really about: just getting there. Maybe the City of Dreaming Spires—the foundational lifeblood of education in the Western world—wasn’t itself the dream, but the entry point to something I could have never imagined, never seen until now. Love. Family. Connection. A life. And the freedom to decide, on my own terms, what I want to do, what I’m going to do with my calling.

The hardest thing is love, with no expiration date, no qualifiers, no safety net. Love that demands acceptance of all the things I cannot change. Love that doesn’t follow a plan.

“It’s a good thing I don’t love you, Ella from Ohio.”

We were never forever, Jamie and I. Nothing is in this life. But if you love someone, and are loved by someone, you might find forever after. Whatever and wherever that is.

To know and love one other human being is the root of all wisdom. —Evelyn Waugh, Brideshead Revisited