I did write a post last Sunday, I just didn’t actually post it because… I don’t know, I wasn’t ready to recognize the fact that it would be my second-to-last post in Oxford.

And now I am writing my last post in Oxford. But I am ready to recognize that?

A week from now, I will be home in San Francisco, and that thought makes me really happy. It also really hurts.

On Friday night (the 19th), I started saying goodbye to the rest of my friends here, and on Saturday all of my friends except for my roommate left. That day was probably the hardest energy/emotional crash I have experienced while being here. From about 10pm Friday night until 10pm Saturday night I am pretty sure I didn’t make it through more than about 2 hours straight without crying. We had the brilliant idea on Friday night of buying up tons of chocolate from the vending machines with the rest of the money on our Bod cards (student cards), pushing the two beds in the room together to make one SuperBed, and curling up together and watching Parent Trap (the whole England-America double life thing… surprisingly relevant…).

So I cried during that. (When Lindsey Lohan/Halley gets to see her mom, Natasha Richardson, for the first time… oh man, it gets me so bad)

We finished around 2:30am, and I tried to sleep and failed, so I put on some depressing music and cried some more, slept a little, got myself out of bed at 9:30am to help carry suitcases down the staircase and walk my friends outside… and spent the rest of the day curled up in my room watching Elementary (it’s kind of my comfort show– I empathize with Joan Watson/Lucy Lui so hard).

I did manage to pull myself together enough to go to Blackwell’s and read about 30 pages of Ulysses, and then walked through the Holywell cemetery again and cried some more.

It’s weird, because I’ve barely cried while I’ve been here, and I guess my body just decided to get it all out in one day. I couldn’t even have pinpointed an exact reason for it. It has to do with leaving, and having to detach from all the people I’ve grown to care about, and just… knowing it is never going to be like this again. And just kind of letting myself mourn that.

My roommate and I went to bed early that night (after a major moment of culture shock: we heard what sounded like gunshots right outside our window, which was open, and both dropped to the floor and covered our heads and moved away from the windows before realizing that we were in England, and the likelihood of a school shooting was next to zero. In fact, they were fireworks to celebrate the end of term).

When I woke up this morning, I felt a lot better, and I went for a run and finished Ulysses (yay!!!) and bought some nail polish. 😀

Without everyone here, and with my last tutorial and my roommate leaving on Tuesday, it’s going to be a quiet last week, but I think that will be good. I will go for long walks and spend as much time as possible reading in Blackwell’s (oh, how I’m going to miss it!) and trying all of the food I haven’t tried yet.

Since I missed last week, a quick update on the things I’ve been up to with the last of my time here:

– seeing Traces, the performance by the circus troupe Les 7 Doigts de la Main (7 Fingers), in London:

– listening to a talk by Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell at Union Chapel (London again)

– attending a book launch for novelist Sarah Leipciger, led by Mark Haddon (author of Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time, and other books)

– writing and turning in my final short story for Creative Writing, titled “They (Singular)”

– checking out this awesome dude at the Pitt Rivers Museum (which I somehow had not been to before??!?!?! It was freaking awesome!??!?):

– laughing, crying, having loud dance parties in the room, complaining about the weather

– talking to my family over Skype, and feeling so excited to see all of them again, and especially feeling thankful today (Father’s day) for my dad, who listens to me rant about literature nonstop, who has encouraged me in my creative writing pursuits for my entire life, and provided the most inspiring model of someone who made a life doing the creative work he loves. Thank you, Dad, for feeding my curiosity, for asking the big questions with me and admitting it’s okay not to have answers, for all of our adventures past and the many more to come. I miss you and love you a lot, and my mom, and my Sister Bear, and all of my wonderful family and loved ones, those who I will see soon back in the Bay Area and at Spirit Lake, those in Arizona, and those abroad all over the world.

If home is where the heart is, then I have a great many homes.