There are days when your newsfeed works against you. Yesterday was one of those days. Three of my friends are headed back for another term at my hallowed Oxford without me. And both BuzzFeed and the NY Times decided to gang up on me and remind me why nothing, nothing can compare to my semester in the City of Dreaming Spires.
Oxford is hard to describe to people who don’t know it. I’ve tried to explain it by saying “the air smells intelligent,” which doesn’t make any real sense and, instead, makes people doubt how I ended up at Oxford in the first place. But I stand by it.
There’s a cool edge to the air that quivers with potential. I breathed it as I walked down cobblestone lanes, trying to wrap my brain around the fact that 800 years of students had strolled them before me. I breathed it as I biked down Banbury Road with my dinner gown flapping in the wind. I breathed it as I ate potatoes, potatoes, and more potatoes in a Harry Potter dining hall, sitting next to some of the smartest people in the world, who will go on to be neurosurgeons, composers, writers…leaders of the modern world. I breathed it deeply as I ran along the banks of the Isis and watched rowers’ oars beat like butterfly wings. I breathed excessively it as I hyperventilated about paper deadlines and my increasing sleep debt. Oxford was the deepest, most scintillating breath of air I’ve had. Try going back to standard oxygen after that.
If you happen to have the glorious good luck of still being an undergraduate, I urge you to check out this program to study for a term in Oxford. (And no, you don’t even have to be a UGA student!) It absolutely rocked my world. Three years have passed and I still see it as the best three months of my life. Now please, I’m going to go happy-drown in memories.
Cheers,
MB
Molly On the Move 