I have biscuits. I have tea. That should be more than enough.

I would begin by saying that I have some urgent information to convey to you, but the complete truth is I am stalling. The poet of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight awaits me downstairs in a book with a split spine and my eyes get twitchy whenever I read the words “priceless pearl” too many times.

What to say, then, to fill the time? I’ve given in to a few indulgences. For a month and a half I did not buy a single item that I would bring back with me to America. Every purchase consisted of something I would either eat or drink. Last week, then, in the spirit of pure youthful rebelliousness, I ventured into the Mythical Primark and bought a wonderful pair of boots for eight pounds and scurried home in my sinful glee.

Today, I rewarded myself again (Primark is fast becoming the haunt of my earthly temptations) and bought a pair of olive cowboy boots for three pounds (I mean dear sweet Lord in heaven, it would practically be a travesty not to buy them; I can’t buy a cup of coffee for that cheap) as well as two waist belts for a total of a seven pound purchase. A meal at your average Oxford restaurant will cost at least eight pounds. I felt justified.

Is it silly that I want to go to a ball? The tickets are outrageously (and understandably) priced, so it hasn’t even crossed my mind as a possibility. Like Cinderella I sit at home huddled in my cold room reading epic poetry and wishing some fairy godmother would bestow me with a spun-glass gown and some Gucci heels. And then I think of the Starving Children and the Diseased and Impoverished and feel guilty. I have biscuits. I have tea. That should be more than enough.

But a ball would be lovely. Except that the dream would be incomplete as I left my better half at home. Even if I could afford it, it seems somehow less grand to go alone when there is someone you would very much wish to bring.

I am squirmy. Part of it is my eyesight. It is becoming increasingly difficult to just sit down and read anything, and part of it has to do with the removed and exuberant lingual style of the texts I have set for myself: The Epic of Gilgamesh, Beowulf, The Prose Edda, Arthurian romances, etc. etc. Not exactly like whipping through a nice Janet Evanovich. I’m sure there are moments of humor in the Romance of the Rose, but, well…it is a very lot of description of trees and things, and I’m afraid the dramatic tension has been lost in translation of time. The other part of it is the sight itself—I honestly think I need glasses. And reading 10-15 books a week is sort of aggravating the blurriness.

The other edge to the squirminess is this mild yet pervasive discontent. Things are worrying me. Capstone, graduation requirements, applications to community colleges and the transferring of units, petitions for catalogue replacements, housing for senior year, financials, going to Paris for a week and not knowing how to speak French, my career, my goals, my dreams, the sudden disturbance of the vision for my life. Shampoo.

I am always wanting to be somewhere that I am not. I feel like this is a problem.

When I’m in Seattle, I want to be in LA. When I’m in LA I want to be in Oxford. When I’m in Oxford I want to be in Tucson. If I’m doing one thing, I’d rather be doing another, and if I’m doing another I’d rather be doing the thing which I am not doing because I am doing the other thing. It is perhaps not so bad as that, but it is like a constant low-grade headache; a slight but ever-present tension. I have been here before. Nothing under the sun is new.

It is disturbing to think that I am 21. The thin edge of the knife is growing closer and I feel so unprepared to balance on its edge. How will I go about finding my own apartment after college, let alone paying for it? How do you set up utilities? Is it polite to ask contacts for a job? Am I willing to work five years in a position I hate in the hopes I will be granted a position I love? Am I really good at what I do or would I simply be embarrassing myself to show up for an interview in Hollywood with one second-place short story in an undergraduate writing competition and a reel that certainly mumbles, “Don’t look at me, I was made in college with a $15 budget and a director without a spine.”

I am 21. My mother was married and had a child by the time she was my age. Let alone feeling unprepared, I feel unwilling to step into the Great Beyond of Adulthood. When I close eras in my life, I have trained myself to forget them. And it frightens me beyond words to know that in leaving childhood officially behind, I will be surrendering forever some of my best stories. My melodrama shows through and yet I don’t exaggerate. Memories are a problem for me. They slip so easily behind locked neurons, dissolving like the little mermaid into sea foam, into gray matter.

J. M. Barrie never grew up. He was brilliant, and he was incomplete. This is the tension of Peter Pan—knowing so explicitly one side of joy, and being so completely barred from all knowledge of the other. I straddle the line and I cannot decide and it is maddening to fully understand that this is not a both/and situation.

So I sit here in Oxford and I write my essays and I read my books and all the while the tension is mounting towards some fatal decision. Either way, a part of me dies. The adult murders the child with interest accruement and DMV lines and clipping coupons. The child cannot fathom the adult, denies its existence, and banishes it to the Shadow-Cave. If we do not believe something exists, it ceases to. Clap for the fairies, all ye Children At Heart, for you are clapping for your younger buried selves.

I feel things too fully, I think. My joys are out of proportion and my sorrows are illogical. She is not balanced, they might say. Sensory and emotional overstimulation. This is why I hide in my room. This is the appeal of hermitage.

In the end, what does a girl like me have to say? Far too little, and yet with so many words. I fear I could never be an existentialist.

This started with shoes and evolved into…excessive thinking. I ask myself these questions knowing elucidation is elusive, that is the point. I will not grasp these things. I will not understand.

Silence is kind. It neither condemns nor praises.

Goodnight, cyberspace.

—Neither Here Nor There