I. Delirium
My only sleep in the 48-hour period descended upon me in the form of a wretched, semi-conscious state as I tried desperately to stay awake to follow what exactly Keanu Reeves was up to in “Constantine” and how he performed that exorcism. Somehow, any urge to pass out departed from my body the second the plane landed — I think by that point I was too far gone. I made my way through the airport like a walking corpse, not really sure of where I was or what I was up to, feeling at every checkpoint that I was shirking some conversation I was supposed to have with border control but not caring enough to confirm or deny these suspicions with anyone.
My clever self had, the night before, booked my bus from the airport to pick me up at 10 in the morning — my flight was scheduled to get in around 6, but my experiences flying with discount airlines have seeded in me a severe distrust for times-tables. I expected the flight to get in at least an hour late. I was horribly mistaken.
By the time I reached the airport lobby, it was 6:10 on the dot, and though my mind was near-empty of thoughts, I do recall the sentiment “Oh, no” drifting vaguely through my head. I dragged my suitcases to an empty table in the cafe, ordered a shot of espresso, and sat, shivering with morning feeling, by the window as the English sun caressed my hair lovingly and whispered “wake up” in my ear.
It was mid-September. The summer had rushed by — I spent most of it working 12-hour days at my seasonal job, and when I wasn’t on the clock, I was either getting ready to be or too tired to do anything productive. It’s a shame, too; I’d convinced myself back in the spring that I’d do a bit of writing over the break, but by the time I left Augusta a few days prior, I’d written not a single word. The fact that I was working full-time was no excuse to me; I made a commitment to myself that I would spend some time writing in spite of this, but I disregarded this commitment because I discerned, correctly, that nothing would happen if I didn’t.
Writing is something I love and dread equally. I can’t quite place the reason — I guess it’s daunting to me, to turn an empty page into something filled with imperfect words. I don’t usually think of myself as a perfectionist, but, truthfully, perhaps I am in my writing. I hate disappointing myself; I hate rereading what I’ve written and having to rewrite it because I can’t bear to continue typing knowing some reprehensible phrasing is written a few lines higher. So I take writing monotonously slow, one sentence at a time, which makes everything much more effortful and, admittedly, less enjoyable, but I’m stuck in this rut of doing things exactly in this unproductive way, because I always have for as long as I’ve been writing. And I don’t know what to do about it.
None of this crossed my mind in the stupor that I was experiencing at the airport cafe. I stared blandly down at my disgruntled napkin, where I’d doodled a handful of simple faces and vague shapes. I’d run out of space. I gave the window a good Kubrick stare as I put my pen away before I revived my consciousness to check the time. It was 6:30. I looked back out the window.
An idea fell into my mind with the force of a brick dropped from one thousand feet.
An idea for a story.
In the same way bricks rarely drop from one thousand feet in the sky, ideas rarely come to me without my trying very hard to think of them. It wasn’t something I could pass up. Voraciously, I dug my phone from my pocket — it was around 40%, but I didn’t care. I didn’t care that I had no Wi-Fi, no service and no charger; I didn’t care that the only way I could access my bus ticket was via my phone. I had an idea, and, in my delirious state, that meant that without a doubt, I needed to write. And there were no thoughts to stop me.
II. The Bus to the End of the World
This was what I had written at the top of my notebook page. There was nothing under it. My pencil hovered over the paper, dawdling a few centimeters from the lines as I rolled it between my fingers, buying time as I picked through the crevices of my mind. The title sounded exciting but, in reality, it probably wasn’t.
I left the house mid-afternoon. I was going stir-crazy. Classes didn’t start for another half a month; I’d barely been in Oxford a week, but I’d wandered off somewhere different each day. I get suffocated if I stay inside for too long, if my life feels too static. I have to keep myself busy.
Nearly a week and I’d written nothing. It wouldn’t have been a problem if I’d been busy, but I hadn’t. For once in my life — for the first time in years, really — I had nothing to do. I spent my mornings sleeping, my afternoons in City Centre, meandering up and down Cornmarket Street, my evenings staring at a blank document on my laptop, staring and writing nothing. I spent my nights awake. This was the cycle I created for myself — this miserable cycle. Its kinetics were powerful; no matter how horrible I felt, how tired, how unproductive, useless, the next day would whirl around in refrain.
I couldn’t focus at home. I couldn’t motivate myself elsewhere. On Saturday, then, the first weekend, I took my notebook, a pencil and nothing else to the Beechcroft Road bus stop to catch the next bus north. I was seeking something that I couldn’t identify.
It was the afternoon, cool but not cold. I’d left the house at an awkward time and ended up just missing the S3, so I stood at the stop for nearly half an hour with a blank notebook open in my hands. I couldn’t bring myself to scribble anything down. The root of the reason I decided to leave the house was because I wanted to be inspired by a change of scenery, to observe something new and exciting and turn that feeling into words on paper.
A few bikes whirred past me. I leaned against the plexiglass wall of the bus shelter, studying the historic buildings, watching the road, the cars, the people. I breathed the air and felt the autumn wind and shivered, wrote a line or two, and forgot about it. I felt completely empty.
When I was a kid, that was how I would come up with stories — I would pick an object or a person and attribute a conflict to it, and I would write. I could write endlessly. I wrote the most egregious things, because it didn’t matter what I wrote. I was writing for the sake of it, for the thrill, for the joy and wonder of creating something impossible, something complex, something exhilarating. I don’t do that anymore.
The idea for the title came to me because I thought far too hard about everything I was thinking about, which, once the Stagecoach arrived, was the ride and nothing else. I wanted to investigate the subjectivity of reality. It wasn’t working.
The other reason the title occurred to me as it did was because I thought I was getting off at the bus’s last stop, Chipping Norton, a little rural town surrounded by farmlands about an hour north of Oxford. Though I didn’t realize it when I left the house that afternoon, this made me twice wrong in my expectations:
I would not write anything of consequence, and I was not going to Chipping Norton.
III. Fox
There were dogs everywhere. This was one of the first things I noticed about Woodstock, which was the name of the town where I was not trying to go.
I wasn’t trying to not go there, but I would’ve ended up another half-hour north if I’d been on the right S3.
It didn’t matter to me that I ended up at Woodstock rather than Chipping Norton; setting out with a destination in mind is an important part of finding yourself somewhere you didn’t mean to go, which is far more fun than actually getting where you intended to be. That’s the freeing thing about travelling just to travel — even better if you’re travelling alone, which I was. I was obligated to nothing and no one. I had nowhere to be.
Upon my initial arrival to the town, I intended to make it to Chipping Norton by catching the next bus headed that way, which wasn’t for another half hour, but I was too unbothered to pay attention to the time. The town enticed me; it was quaint, picturesque. It shared Oxford’s cobbled buildings and streets, but everything was smaller, more intimate. Homely. Ivy clung to the exteriors of churches and shops; little curly dogs trotted beside their aging owners.
Not many people in Oxford take their dogs out. I miss seeing dogs. I miss my dogs, Rosie and Wookiee — I miss them badly — and I miss all my other dogs that live at the kennel where I work. Arguably, I spent more of my summer with dogs than with people, which makes it all that more devastating not having any around.
I made a slow walk around the town, and by the time I ended up back at the bus stop, the church bell had rung for a fresh hour. The next bus had already passed. There would be another soon enough, but aside from knowing the hour, without a watch, I wasn’t sure of the time — I’d recently decided that I wanted nothing to do with my American smartphone and put in an order for a UK phone that hadn’t yet reached me. Naturally, this didn’t dissuade me from adventuring off without a lifeline.
The bookshop was directly behind the stop. I walked in, passing by a cardboard box of apples in the doorway labeled “Take Some!” and asked the woman in the empty store for the time. She gave it to me, and I thanked her, left, checked the times-tables and immediately re-entered. The next bus wasn’t for another 30 minutes.
The store was small, and the books were new. In Oxford, no one buys new books — it’s a waste of money; there are used bookshops everywhere. I didn’t pay much attention to the titles I was browsing; really, I just needed to busy myself as I waited. What did catch my attention, however, was the dog.
She was lounging on a small fluffy white carpet in the back corner of the shop: a petite Shiba Inu with a coil of slack rope anchoring her to one desk leg. I gaped at her.
I begged the woman to let me pet her, and she said of course, and I thanked her like I owed her my life. It was only the two of us in the shop. The dog was lazy and unbothered, and as I gave her a lovely patting, I explained to the woman how desperate I had been to fill the dog-shaped void in my soul that had been ailing me.
“Well, I’m glad you found us,” the woman said earnestly, with wide-eyed sincerity.
And I agreed and laughed, because I was too enthralled with the dog to stop smiling.
The dog’s name was Fox, the woman told me, and her name was Linda. She worked the shop on weekends, loved to read, wrote often, and was expecting her friend, who was visiting from London, to stop by soon.
I was on my way to Chipping Norton, I told her, from Oxford, where I studied English at the University. I had been meaning to write today, but I somehow couldn’t.
She knew the experience, as all writers do — her method of motivation was to set a timer and work early in the morning, and I said that was a great idea, and shouldn’t I try it. So we discussed writing and poetry and books until Fox got bored of listening to us and wandered off. I retrieved her, and Linda told me she was newly-adopted and didn’t listen to anyone but was quite well-tempered.
My dogs are the same way. Linda’s saying this prompted me to remember, and she listened with honest interest as I described them as best as I could; as I petted Fox, I discussed Georgia and she discussed England.
“What do you recommend I should do here?” I asked, and she answered that I must visit Blenheim Palace. She drew out a map of directions on a sticky note so I could find the entrance. And — she added — should I ever need anything, I should email her. She wrote her contact information on another sticky note.
Linda’s friend had a dog named Taco, and in an hour’s time, they had both joined us, everyone had been introduced and the shop was closing. “It was lovely to meet you,” Linda said, “and please do come by the shop again if you’d like.” And I told her I would, and that I was very happy to have met her, and that I would surely visit again, because Fox would need company — Linda laughed — and I said goodbye to Fox, who didn’t care at all what I said to her.
It was almost dusk. Linda’s pen sketch of the path down to the Palace guided me; I slipped through the green gate and turned down the middle of the path, hearing the ducks honk and the water splash and the soft, lone talk of children with their parents. Across the pond, a smattering of white sheep grazed on the vivid grass. Wandering through the grounds as the people dwindled, as the birds receded, I felt, finally, that I had a story.
—
It’s Mid-November, a lazy Sunday afternoon, and Heidi is purring herself to sleep in my lap. Fox isn’t around — Linda has taken the dog out of town with her while she’s away for the weekend.
“If you want a house all to yourself, come and stay,” she insisted to me the last time I visited the bookshop. I come by to see her often; we keep each other up-to-date about what we’ve been writing and reading and how things are going.
I took her up on the offer primarily because I needed some solitude, but secondly, because I found out about the cat. Heidi is an absolute sweetie; she’s more affectionate than my dogs are. And she’s trapped me. I can’t get up, now — I could never bring myself to wake her. I thumb through the pages of “Hamlet” for the millionth time before I give up altogether. I’ll get my work done at home when I leave in a few hours.
It won’t be my last time here. When Linda found out I didn’t have plans for Christmas, she invited me over for the holiday break. “Taco will be there, too,” she said, smiling. Her friend is coming in from London. Her house is open anytime, she tells me.
And sitting here with Heidi in my lap, enjoying a quiet house, smiling to myself as I recall Linda’s kindness and generosity, I can’t stop thinking:
Isn’t it fortunate that I got on the wrong bus?
