Two years to the day and feelin' the Oxford blues

As of yesterday, it's been two years since I completed my undergraduate university education. And it's two years since I arrived back in the U.S. after spending a semester – my last semester – abroad in Oxford, U.K. Two years ago at this time, I was filled with a deep sense of longing and remorse for the loss of a part of my life that I couldn't help wondering if I'd taken for granted. My months in Oxford had been the best months of my life and I knew it. I wondered – and very much doubted – if life could ever be that good again. My ubiquitous post-college life loomed uncertainly before me and I had no idea what on earth I was supposed to do with myself.

As of today, I've been in Japan for longer than I was in the U.K. Let me tell you, Moka is no Oxford. There's no surging intellectual aura about the city that pervades every aspect of daily life. There's no dimly lit pub, within a two-minute walk of my grungy flat, where I can splurge on a pint of Old Speckled Hen and watch the bartenders banter with the regular patrons through an impenetrable haze of cigarette smoke. And I'm different, too: I'm no longer the poetically penniless university student, blissful in my poverty and relative detachment from the drudgery of the economic machine.

I don't want to go back to Oxford. Or, what I mean is, even if I do want to go back to Oxford, I'm wise enough to know that I can't go back – at least not back to the Oxford I left two years ago. Even now, new laws have ensured that the air in the Radcliffe Arms won't be clouded with cigarette smoke (a change which, even now, the knowledge of which makes me a little sad). But, more importantly, I'm not an undergraduate. And I'm not poor. If I went back to Oxford today, I'd find myself suddenly able to afford to do all the things I wanted to do but couldn't the first time around. And I think that would make it certainly less magical.

I should have read Jude the Obscure. I'm sure I'd have better insights on this point if I had. But, for the moment, I'm still just trying to figure out what comes next. In a little over a month, I'll have to decide (or at least I flatter myself now with the assumption that I'll be asked to decide) whether I'm going to renew my contract for a second year of teaching in Moka. Why am I here? and Is this where I'm supposed to be? are questions I've been asking myself a lot lately. And I still haven't come up with answers. As of today, I've spent two years trying to figure out what it means to live as an adult. And that little effort is still giving me quite a bit of trouble.