I begin writing at 9:18pm by the river. The clouds are above me, looking down in amorous glances. The cows have left their marks early this morning and have since moved back home, slowly and tenderly groaning. The log we all sat on last night has partially submerged itself in the water, and I am now forgetting if we had anything to do with its drowning. 

In the daylight I sympathised with the wood, yet do nothing to save it out of the River Cam. It must know its surroundings, and it must adapt.

Laying my head on the grass I close my eyes. The moon peeks through to check on me, and I nod my head. Smiling through cracked lips, I continue to dream. 

-

Despite the rigorous academic course load that Cambridge notoriously assigns, this is about how my days of studying have passed me by. 

One by one they imbue me in rich literature and spirits, laying me down at the end of the day onto a lopsided twin size mattress, where I will sleep through my night, your day, and awake to the start of my day, the end of your night. The next day would be the same, and I lay back a couple drinks more amongst friends. Rinse, repeat, rinse, repeat, rinse. 

However, there is a fault in my confounding pleasure, I have found, as I often rely on idleness in hopes that I can preserve just how little time I have to spend here. Six weeks is certainly not enough time to carefully and articulately sip a city down to the bottom of its glass, so I find myself indulging in large gulps here and there. For a city that has existed since 1209, where the clocks have all struck twelve the same as they have since the early thirteenth century, there is little justice that forty-two days can do for such rich and filling history. So I turn towards the cadence of localized digressions, just as Wordsworth, Woolf, and Hughes have done, and I have considered, roughly, that my indulgence in culture and the arts is necessary for my experience, and rather not the rhetoric of my theorising scholarship.

-

I spend gloomy Saturdays walking around the city of Cambridge, lodging myself in tight alleys and flooded pathways.

This Saturday, I felt the back of my neck at four o’clock, a few drops of sweat tickled the inside of my palm, and decided to miss the Neuroscience lecture I told many I’d attend. It was simply much too humid and there was no wind to aid my relief, and I had grown hungry lying on the grass flirting with the sun.

I settled on fish for lunch at The Eagle. I looked at the wine menu first. Nothing stood out to me, so I asked the waiter for sparkling water. I continued to write in the middle of me being served, and the waiters exchanged glances. 

They are fine people, the British. They have made me feel simultaneously an intruder and an insider, and I find that this suits my inherent flimsiness. To have one foot wedged in the door gives me a sort of relief, as if this duality of being both inside and out soothes a type of nervousness of wrong decision, for I tend to exist in multiple places at once and I am often thinking of home. 

My eyes glisten when I speak the word ‘home’ aloud. Trying to distract myself, I read the wine list again, mulling over tasting notes and French vowels my American tongue has never pronounced. The waiter watches and takes this as me re-thinking my initial decision to waive the wine, so in a flustered collection of “ums” followed by the crinkling of shy blue eyes, I am woefully and delightedly surprised when a full glass of Zuccardi Malbec waltzes in front of me two minutes later. So it goes, I suppose, idleness and indulgence do go hand in hand. 

By the time I leave the table, notebook still in hand, I look out to see the sun’s warmth nestled under the horizon. The early stars have begun their routine of dancing. There is then a desolate and incessant urge to call back home. To hear the faint whisper of a groggy morning, of too hot of coffee, or too little sleep.

To call back and hear what I am used to –– what I was used to –– seems ill-lit and empty as England approaches dusk and America approaches dawn. 

And besides, if I were to call home, who would answer? 

Each time I have this thought I engage in mental arithmetic:

What is twenty-two minus eight? What is twenty-two minus twelve minus eight? Why do the clouds paint themselves across the sky and not the other way around?

The answer is five. 

It is five in the morning at home? I must have my maths wrong, they must be awake and roaming just as I am awake and roaming. 

And yet, what would my father say if I were to cry on the phone at time well beyond their waking hours? My mother?

How can a postcard with so little writing space carry the weight of my body limp and white, as if to say ‘I love you, I am living, I am present, I love this city and I also love you and I miss you, my family, my home.’ 

If I were to call home, would I interrupt their sleep?

-

When I turn in for bed I like to keep my window propped open (in part because I think I underestimated how hot it gets in the United Kingdom during the summer) and some nights I hear people from all across the world spewing their love towards one another.

There is such a rapturous nobility that has walked past my window in the early morning hours that I often think of the times I received such gestures back home. The hugs my parents left me with have burned the top layer of my skin, and my body still feels hot in the areas where they clung. 

-

It aches in places I cannot reach, a vast uncomfort spreads itself like infection, and I imagine the feeling of heavy quilt covers enveloping me, the coo of my mother’s voice serenading me into careless slumbers, and I open my eyes to the frail image of moonlight skidding across water. 

As night falls on my side of the globe I am reminded of the way the sun begins its ascent over my family’s home. I am again reminded that I have three more weeks of indulgence and idleness and three more weeks until I am home.

-

I take another sip and walk along the cracked stone of short bridges. When I look over the edge, I find not only my reflection but the reflections of generations before me, and so we go on this way: staring back into the moon-lit stillness of Cambridge’s river.