We arrived in Oxford late in the morning, drizzle running off the umbrellas of fresh-faced students who buzzed about the halls entrance. We slipped into the building through a closing door and made our way to Ava’s room and waited for her to return from a tutorial. Two empty vodka bottles stood almost entirely alone on the dark wooden shelf. As she entered the room, I had to do a double take. The baggy jeans, wet around the sides of the trainers with splashes up the ankles from a bike, the old leather bomber jacket and hair, tied back. My little sister had grown up into a real university student. One who carried the distinctive, somewhat stereo typical, combination of maturity that comes with navigating novel environments yet unencumbered by anxiety due to the lack of boundless space. Just like how the blank page can stifle possibility, institutional frameworks can set you free.
I envied her lightness and was perturbed by how not long ago I was also weightless, with only exams and essays to hold me down. I am currently tutoring a girl who is 19. To me, 19 is only a heartbeat away, but I feel that she sees the four years between as gaping. Years of new cities, new friends, new worlds. All those things did happen, but they have now folded inwards and now I am here. Perspective and time are mutable and inextricably linked. The years before the death no longer feel like a distant space on a linear progression but rather stare sadly at me from across the way. As if they were years lived by someone else.
We bid our farewells to Ava as she decides which library to go to, dark academia or Emma Watson? As I sunk back into the car my heart sunk back into grief. I wished to be in a new place, distracted. Instead, I find myself in this in this looping place, a space within myself but only sometimes accessible. When I am there part of me wants to leave whilst the other half wants to stay, because I know it is hard to return to. Raindrops tussle shoulder-to-shoulder down the window. I look up from my book, “what a horrible day” I mutter, only partly talking about the weather.
As I step out the car the sound of a braking bike breaks the cemetery’s silence. “We’re closing in 10 minutes.” Our contact with the dead is constrained by the living, by the mundane parameters of opening times. My heart feels tender as tears fight to flow. In these moments, on these looping days, anniversaries, birthdays, I feel such a pressure to connect with my pain, as if it is some sentence to be endured and that in every day that goes by where I laugh and do not cry, I am cheating them and lying to myself. I know that tomorrow the portal will begin to close and so I press the bruise, to feel the pain, because though I can remember it (in theory) I can no longer feel the love – and it is better to feel something rather than nothing.
This day was two years since Spencer died. Two feels significant because it feels like the beginning of the rest. It is not ground zero and it is not one. Grief exists in binaries. Two is the beginning of a slow ascendency. People speak as if death is final but really it is infinite from the perspective of the living. Anniversaries increasing in magnitude whilst supposedly giving diminishing returns. 2 3 4… on until you cannot count any more. Infinite because when you cease, time stands still and someone else takes up the count.
mountains of my life 