Originally, I was planning to translate my last blog post into English as a thank you to all of my amazing English-speaking friends that would click on my blog and try to read it via Google translate. Your heroic efforts mean a lot to me.
As you can see, in the end
I decided against it: I felt that little of what is written in Slovak
here would really say something new to you who have been through Oxbridge with
me. Even more likely, you would realize you have much better stories to tell,
and where would that leave me...
Instead, I have decided to
write a Note from Uhrovec, Uhrovec being the small village I come from,
so that you know what to expect next time you pass by. Only in English – to
lovingly screw over all my Slovak-only readers. Exclusive content at its best.
Post exam rehab
(written on June 26)
Only 13 hours earlier, I was mentally grumbling about the loud
Spanish youth trying to get into my airport bus at Gloucester Green and
wondering what to do with my notes on Economic History; now I am drowsily watching
the road ahead, my head bobbing against the car window, wondering how dangerous
it is that my dad is driving on the wrong side of the road. He doesn’t seem to
be concerned, though, so I doze off again, only to come to senses
a few minutes later, ashamed that I called driving on the right „the
wrong side of the road“.
I have stayed in that country for too long, I think, and then
fall asleep again.
I had sat my last exam literally a day ago, and going back home for the
shortest of visits seemed like the right way to combat the post-exam “what to
do with my life” despair. I boarded a bus and then plane straight from the
MPhil end-of-year, end-of-everything party; keeping myself busy when I don’t
really have any capability to think seemed to work. Moreover, I am due to start
an internship in London after this, so these three days are also all of my
summer holiday. I don’t even need to type the joke that British summer hardly
lasts any longer anyway.
When I wake up, we are already making the last turn and I can
hear the most beautiful barking of them all. I ask my mum what’s new in
the village – have I missed anything whilst I was trying to catch up
on two weeks´ worth of sleep? When she shakes her head, I feel a warm wave of
happiness rising right through me.
Or is it because the car has stopped and I am finally home?
I walk the short narrow path and try to absorb it all, the changes my
parents made half-grudgingly, half-lovingly in the garden since I was here in
Easter, the dog´s happy jumping around, the rural silence, the breeze in the
leaves of the forest that has been standing waiting right across the street
ever since I can remember, and then some.
I don’t do much for the next two days. I simply try to do everything I
normally would – I normally did: breakfast bread with ham and hot chocolate,
listen to ancient pop on Slovak radio, fetch my mum this and that from
granddad´s potato cellar while she cooks lunch, in the afternoon run to the
corner shop for ice-cream and toilet paper, trying to somehow make my old
sweatpants look more glamorous as I walk. I wash up and walk the dog, I sit in
the room I still share with my sister, trying to detect all the changes and
alternations she´s made since I was last home. It feels like trying to fit into
your old clothes after they´ve been sitting at the bottom of the wardrobe for
too long. In fact, given that I didn’t bring any trousers from Oxford that is
precisely what I am doing.
It´s extremely easy to romanticise everything, and I do it well: every
single deviation from the Oxford standard gets in my head amplified to
wonderfully monstrous dimensions. My feather duvet and the cold, clean feel of
tiled floor; the large window with nothing but the tip of a tree outside of it;
remembering to glance at the stars when I walk to shut the greenhouse door in
the evening and realising, half surprised, that they are still there. A full
fridge and a full house, not in that order; the freedom of my days; the bread. The
mere thought of getting up and going somewhere in this village – a faculty, a
library – sounds as weird as going through a Saturday morning without hearing
at least two circular saws at work. It is beautiful.
The one problem, of course, is that nobody else seems to live in this
hazy nostalgic day-dreaming. My parents go to work and grocery-shopping and
worry about the new weird sound the car has learnt to make, while my sister
lives a completely new life on her own as it becomes more and more difficult
for me to keep up. They plan the weekend meals and where they are going to stop
on their way from the airport, and I can do nothing but watch and offer some
half-related anecdote from Oxford.
And then, in a blink, my summer holiday is over. They drive me to the
airport and wait for me to get through the security with my suddenly very
pointy knitting needles (... what a stupid idea). I am waiting for some big
thought, a revelation or an emotion, something to give this all a little bit
more meaning and help me figure out how I really feel, but of course nothing
comes: it is just an airport full of holiday-goers.
I board the plane with the old mix of fear, unwillingness and thrill. A
part of me knows that going back is the only thing that makes sense – at home I´d
get bored and impatient and idle and would find a way to swim back eventually
anyway – but the other half just doesn’t really get it. Mid-air, I resort to eating
the wafers I intended to bring for my Oxford friends, and then out myself in a
blog.
Life makes so little sense sometimes.
