When I came home from the pub this Tuesday evening, with two pints of cider swilling in my stomach, I somehow found myself being chased by my flatmate holding a three-week-old mackerel fillet. I ended up hiding in the laundry room, his corduroy jacket draped across my shoulders like a makeshift shield, ready to pull it over my head whenever I felt the fillet’s slimy scent approaching. 

Now, this may sound like a strange situation to return to, and what’s stranger still is that I’ve begun calling this flat home; this basic, four-storey building that often feels like a mix between a hot conservatory and a retirement home. I’ve been here a month now, and not once have I found myself missing Lancashire, where I grew up. There is a familiar saying that the place where you are born isn’t always the place where you feel like you belong, and as I slid beneath the table, giggling, kicking away a Tupperware box that held more bacteria than the underside of an M&S loo, I realised that I had never felt happier, more at home, or more myself. 

I kept a diary for the first week or so, but I have always found that my mind works far quicker than my pen. Writing by hand feels clumsy. I can never get down exactly what I want without getting a cramp in my hand or feeling a deep desire to cross everything out and rewrite it. It’s like those Disney scenes when a character is frantically writing a grand plan or a love letter, only to rip out every page from their notebook, huff and puff, and send a flurry of crumpled paper into the bin. 

On the phone with my course tutor, he said he had noticed a change in my writing since I moved to Oxford. The words somehow fizz and expand on the screen as though the letters can’t contain themselves. When he said this, I suddenly wondered if my stories would take on a new dimension if they were written by hand, if you could see my anger, frustration and excitement curling with the ink. After considering all of this, I went home and re-read my breakup diary. However, I could only cringe at my first-draft poetry, and the entries that I had thought were prophetic now seemed plucked straight from Rupi Kaur’s notes app. And what’s worse is that I remember writing them, even anointing my confessions with exclamation marks, as if to convince myself I’d stumbled upon some profound truth about breakups that no one had ever realised before. And I remember shutting the notebook with the smug satisfaction of an influencer filming a staged thirst-trip, admiring the result, then hitting ‘post.’ 

I have always wanted to keep a diary, and even though I go to sleep thinking, “I will remember this day,” I have found myself forgetting the details, as if I am sitting in the passenger seat of a fast-moving vehicle, counting the cars, and then forgetting what number I am up to. I may vaguely remember the colours of the day but am not able to attribute a specificity that makes them feel significant. 

To give an example, a few days ago, I came home after seeing a friend whom I hadn’t spoken to in years. We had spent four hours talking without pause and our tongues were practically aching. When my flatmate asked, “So, what have you been up to today?”, I simply said that I’d had a monstrous gossip with Niamh. He asked what we’d talked about, and I was able to summon a few names – this guy we had both kissed, a guy we both hated, and some other things that were floating in my periphery, but then I realised that so much had been said that I’d already forgotten most of it.

I suddenly became afraid of forgetting the year which may turn out to be the most important of my life.

The last few years have moved fast. I gunned straight to university when the worst of the COVID-19 pandemic ended, when I was still a size six and my 18th birthday cards still lined the fireplace. Then, I moved back to Lancashire for a year, dizzy and tired, wearing vintage jeans and a new degree. And although there was a quiet comfort in returning to my old childhood bedroom, I soon found my creativity withering. The one thing that really inspired any writing was my university boyfriend breaking up with me. I recorded the Facetime call so that one day I could write about it, Fleabag-style, how he dumped me to “read a book, be quiet, and learn how to be better.” But not long after, I gave up writing about him and went back to sulking. 

Now, after moving to Oxford for the second year of my master’s, surrounded by students again, sifting through beautiful streets, living in my own land of library white-noise, I feel as though an energy I’d forgotten I had has been restored. It’s as if I’ve swallowed some elixir and restored my superpower, like Shrek and Donkey when they drink a potion and wake up as the shinier, hotter versions of themselves. My mind is suddenly saturated. I’m being thrown through the day at a totally new speed, the colours blurring into a breathless melange of blues and greens. But, I realised today that I need to feel steady. I need to clean my messy room. I need to write it all down, before I become like my flatmate with the mackerel, trying to hand out stories half-rotted by memory, flesh swollen grey with time.