I have just submitted my dissertation. I think I was the second one to submit; at least in the pile there only was one more. Outside the office there were about four or five nervous people, clutching their works. The submission deadline is tomorrow.
I have a strange and sudden sensation (I love the English language! for the alliteration), as if I’ve zoomed out and am observing my life a vol d’oiseau. I feel as if I am to receive a newsletter from life, some sort of a heavenly update.
I had a coffee in Tinderbox today, while waiting for the secretary’s office hours after I’d printed and bound my paper. I couldn’t help going, really: Tinderbox was the first coffee-shop I went to in Glasgow. You know, how it all is: cities, and coffee-shops, where you idly bide your time, imagining as if you’re a writer or an observer of life. All the cities I’ve been to were seen through a coffee-shop window. Coffee-shops, and then streets, which have a coffee aftertaste.
Tinderbox happened to be the first one in Glasgow, when I was new to the city, and Great Western Road was just ’some road’, full of mysteries, and very long (too long: the new shoes with high heels rubbed my feet so badly!). Somehow, I feel that within this year I didn’t really acquire anything; when I was sitting there, on the exactly same chair, all the people I’ve made friends with, all I have done and learnt since then – all that was already there, it had already happened to me.
You know what it’s like: when you come to a city for the first time, you don’t know anyone, and there is no chance that you’ll bump into someone familiar in the street. And it’s amazing how you grow these acquaintances and friendships, like a tree grows brunches; even a person like me, petrified by a prospect of social contact, for whom a party is a torture, and talking to a stranger requires more courage than… anything, really.
It’s amazing how you first live in, and then gradually emigrate from a university, a city as it is described in brochures and leaflets that you are generously supplied with on the first day. First you walk around projecting the campus map onto reality. You go to a cafe to see if it’s true what is written about it in the SRC booklet. You try to connect your new experience with the previous knowledge: you remember all the emails that people have sent you who have been to the city or lived there. You puzzle. It doesn’t look like they describe, it doesn’t feel like it. The campus map is too simplistic and distorted. The streets and avenues bend and twist, and they are hilly, not flat, as the map suggests. Gradually, you leave the paper reality; new maps are drawn directly in your brain by the mysterious impulse and response patterns.
Then comes the music. The music you hear is linked with the place and time where you heard it first forever; it will take a very dramatic experience to fix a new association with it. The music creates landscapes. It paints, it sews. Like a tree gets covered in leaves, you’re covered in contacts and things you do, and things you buy and see. It becomes cosy. It becomes your comfort place. It first challenges you, but then it becomes your comfort zone.
Now I’ve submitted my work I feel some slight and head-turning exultation. As if in the fabric of days a gap suddenly opened, and I slid into that gap. It’s a slightly uncanny, dizzying freedom; a statio, a pause in the routine flow of life.
Before I started my Master’s, I hadn’t known what to expect. When I first walked up Kelvin way, stepping softly on the fallen leaves, I thought: I will walk down this road one day, either in despair or triumph. Neither happened; or both. I didn’t do exceptionally well, I didn’t do badly, either. I just did what was required, wrote my essays and sat my exams.
It could have seemed to some people back home that this decision required some courage, but it did not. I simply didn’t have any other option; I HAD to go away and try something other than what was before my eyes, so I did. The only courageous bit was that I couldn’t support myself, so I owe thousands of pounds to my parents now; and not only just money, but something else. They would say I owe them nothing, but a debt is always in your head. If not for this burden, my exultation would probably be complete.
