A journey that I had made a myriad times, over a four-year stretch was once more a strange and enticing odyssey. It had been five years since I was last here, at my now Alma Mater, where I had matriculated, postulated, become inebriated, and graduated. I came for a reunion with my old university bedfellows; with whom I laughed and cried and came of age in those halcyon years; now scattered to all corners of the British isles, into all manner of careers and degrees of happiness. We had many tales to tell, and old streets to walk down, though it was clear that I had taken our reunion to heart the most. For I do not believe that a single former resident adored this city with the same strength of conviction as myself. 

All manner of quagmires and tragedies have emerged, like an ambush in an alleyway, in the years that have since passed, and yet the city never quite left me. When it was at the fore of my recollection, no other blissful or rose-tinted haze could possibly jostle for space in amongst the awe-filled visions of cloisters and cupolas, and collegiate stone, the smell of geraniums by my first-year window, the sound of students roaring into gear and riding gaily around on bicycles, the hum of reinvention. Where five-hundred years of ever-moving and replenishing youth found its own way through the winding halls of adolescence unbound. Where yesterday and today cut a path in tandem, hacking through the undergrowth, easing the trail for tomorrow to saunter from eighteen to twenty-one; scribbling away in battered old journals and breezing along the waterway in a punting boat, at peace with the world and all of her tenants. And when it was buried underneath, a deep and distant ringing was always there. 

But that time is gone, and shall never return. And all that is left are memories that shall die with me. It is perhaps the greatest and most sincere curse of sapience; that we are blessed with memory, only to desire fiercely, and search fruitlessly for something that cannot be held. I was happy here and am not now. Today I live in chains where once I was free. Tomorrow I shall be older, where once it felt as if I were forever young, and would never slow down. And the next day I shall be even older, and older more the day after that - looking back with a sterner face, scarred by lines and wrinkles, hardened by time and regret, left baffled and bemused by the world around me, which seems intent on throttling the artist and praying to the merchant and financier - more dishonest, less taken by all that is beautiful and good, more conducive to my own flavour of madness, which brews and boils with every day that passes. I do not hate the world as it is, rather for what is is not, or is no longer. I do not hate the world because it is ugly, but rather because it was once beautiful; not because it is lawless, because it was lawful. Disorganised, oriented; loud, quiet; discourteous, civil, and so on. 

And here I sit in disarray, surrounded by the present day. 

I know not when I’ll return. Perhaps I never should. Perhaps it is best for me if I avoid memory entirely, for life as it is simply cannot compete with memory, where all the little annoyances and inconveniences are begotten. Where every once-broken heart is now healed, where every ill and betrayal is reconciled. Perhaps I should give way to the modern methods; I could take up video-gaming and pornography as matters of habit, forget my neighbour’s name, and never speak to him again. Perhaps I should forego love for lust, form for function, reward for convenience. Perhaps I should love my dead-end job, and cherish my malaise-ridden country; I shall embrace the rot, breathe it in and savour the taste, becoming one with all that I despise and fear and wish to see vanquished. Perhaps that is the only way I can be happy again. Perhaps. 

Or perhaps I can retreat into the little corners of comfort and delight that may still be found, and enjoyed without reproach. Maybe I can still wander through cloisters of millennium-aged stone, and give myself to poetry and music, and beauty in the rare little clusters where they reside. Perhaps I shall live entirely in my own head, where the warm glow of memory is as tangible as it can possibly be. Where the world is healthy and well, and can be seen and felt at ones own pace. Though it may just drive me to madness all the more.