Another Year and I'm Still Here

My twenty-seventh birthday present was a one-way plane ticket to England. It was one of the best presents I ever got. And now it’s a year later. My memories of my first day in York are incredibly vivid, and it’s hard to believe it’s been a whole year.

The memories of the time between arriving and really getting settled into life here are, however, much more muddled and hazy. I’m glad I was keeping my diary fairly constantly then, because it’s really the only signpost I have to go by, as I try to navigate the beginning of another year.

Getting here last year was much easier. The house was, to me, empty- it didn’t have any memories, I didn’t have anything or anyone here, no preconcieved notions of how things should be, or what to expect. In my memory, the house gelled together as friends pretty quickly. My journals would, in some ways, contradict that memory. I am amused in a sad and ironic sort of way by how desperately I was trying to cling to my isolationist intentions when I got here… and by how quickly that went straight out the window… and how long I tried to convince myself that I wasn’t failing at it horribly, when all along I clearly knew it was already too late.

I can’t really use last year as a gauge, though, because everything this year is so different. I’m not fresh off a plane, just arriving from running away from my life. My life is here, I have a lot of tangled roots planted in York, and even if it might seem that they would have been sorted and pulled up by everyone leaving, it doesn’t really work that way. Everything here has changed so fast, and I don’t shift that quickly. Within a week I had to get used to the idea of watching my friends leave, a suddenly empty and quiet house, and suddenly it was full again, of strangers. Now there are people living in the rooms of friends whose departures I have barely begun to realise, and I’m definitely not ready yet to go out and make new friends.

Being one of the veterans is a strange feeling. I already have my place here, people I know, a definition of myself in relation to others, even if they’re not here anymore. Inevitably, I find myself comparing the new people to the old, and, as is usual with me, they do not measure up favourably. They seem perfectly nice, but not kindred spirits. Raise your hand if you’ve heard me say this before, and pray that this time it’s true.

One of the biggest differences is that we are not American-dominated this year. We’re very heavy on the women again, but this time we’re firmly tipped towards an English majority. I don’t know if it’s classic English reserve or just this crop of MAs in particular, but the general consensus is that they’re really bland and kind of boring. They seem terribly young and shiningly innocent; I look at them and find myself thinking, Oh, poor things, you have no idea what the year has in store, because grad school does take it out of you shockingly. I hope they get more interesting as the year goes on- not that I wish them trauma-drama or anything, but some modicum of excitement that isn’t mine would be nice. Hopefully once the year gets going and Lords starts and things like that, individual personalities will winnow out. For now, I would generally refer to them all as “nice”, by which I mean that no one thus far seems sufficiently interesting or unique enough to warrant a stronger adjective. Last year’s cast of characters was so dynamic, it’s hard to downshift into this rather pablem existence.

And so the Old Guard troops along. Louisa and I work on our dissertations. Ehren looks for a job and a flat. James and Adrienne go on with their work, Rachel and Luisa spend time with their respective boyfriends. Claire, Ashley, and Christina go to work and buy furniture for their new house. And through it all, we miss tremendously the folks who have gone home.