Ailee Jones

“I blink my eyes, and I am 50.”

At one point, when I was young, I thought something similar: “One day I shall be in college, all alone, without my mother nor my home.”

This shortness of span that one perceives between portions of their life: It is retroactive. It wasn’t always. I was a kid once, imagining the great plains of black-rock-dotted hills; they stretch onward to the end of those clouds, so many, but it’s just one mass, a great big gradient of fuzzy grays, filling in the blank spaces between the branches and above the grass, a pattern behind green-brown mesh. I am on the other side of those hills now. I mistake the immediacy of the memory for a quickness of crossing, that my past lives’ cohabitation with my current implies a temporal closeness.

I look backwards, and infinity is compressed into the blink of an eye.

I look forwards, and it is still before me, standing: grand, peaceful, menacing, massive.

Now shall live with then as that child dreaming in the car sits in the same back left seat as this young man dotting out wisps. They both gaze at the sky, seeing in it both breadth broader than all on the ground and also precision, depth, that one may zoom in forever on white-grey puffy pillow cotton string and find more and more.

It is a shame that our life be finite. The road behind me stays the same length: a single step. The land before me shrinks, folds as we drive through it; it becomes known; it is defiled, no longer sacred and mysterious. It leads to a cliff face. One day, all memory shall live in a small bubble in my head. Decades of everything at my fingertips, so small, meaningful to me, yet so close. Scenes of homes no longer, people now withered and times long past stand together tightly packed in a crowd. They are right behind me. (They do not cheer me on; they stare with hope and fear.) If I could walk backwards, they’d be right there. One step away. Forwards, past the cliff edge lies the black sea too, separated by single step. Great ocean of ink, sloshing viscously like black oil, spilled and spilled into the ocean. Its waves’ ferocity denotes a certain life within, but it’s a hungry, primal one. Before the Big Bang, there were monsters; this black sea below is where they yet persist. Insignificant memory and infinite oblivion sandwich me from back and front. I am squeezed in that moment. There is nothing I may do. Memory grows slightly larger. I plummet.

Yet I still stare at this grand, gray English sky. Clouds bigger than I could ever be scoot along. Heaps of sheep trot along a gray plane. There is a book in my lap; I don’t feel like reading it right now. Clouds drift by like people and trees. The heaviness of the accumulation of memory and the piercing fear of annihilation relent slightly, as time passes; shadows of tabletop cups and vases lengthen; darkened, soaked sand is revealed as tide shrinks.

I blink once more.

We arrive to Oxford.

Lionel Yu is a member of the Class of 2028.