I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how best to articulate my experiences at Oxford. A lot of the day-to-day stuff has already been chronicled, either in my column in The Phoenix or here, but somewhere in between landing in Miami in late June, taking a three day trip to Boston for no particular reason, and working 50+ hours per week at Apple, I never got around to formally looking back on my nine months in England and sorting out my thoughts on it all.

Part of the problem, of course, is that sorting out my feelings about Oxford — at least right now — involves sorting out my feelings about my former relationship. While my ex and I parted on acceptably good terms, whenever someone asks me, “How was England?” I find it difficult to respond in any other capacity than as the guy who’s freshly broken up and not particularly thrilled about it. My feelings about my year abroad — and, more generally, about England — are so inextricably bound up with my experiences in and out of my relationship with C. that separating them feels nearly impossible.

In a way, that brings out one of the big lessons I learned from my time in England: getting too invested in anything too quickly is dangerous. As I wrote previously, I found that, upon arriving in an unfamiliar country, all I wanted to do was find a group of close friends and never speak to or see anyone else ever again. I latched onto a handful of people, who ultimately turned out to be kind of awful, and used them as an ersatz support structure, in place of the friends it took me two years to find at Swarthmore. Even once I moved past that initial mistake, most of my social life revolved around my boyfriend; if I fought with him, or had a bad day and he wasn’t available, I was left with perhaps one or two other people to turn to. While I’m a fairly independent person, it was hard to be in an unfamiliar place, under stressful emotional and academic conditions, without any sort of safety net.

Before I left Oxford, though, I made it a point to seek out those parts of the city or experience that meant the most to me — independent of the people I associated them with — and spend some time taking them in, on my own.

Academically, this meant revisiting all my writing from the year, all 132,603 words of it. Without a doubt, the three eight-week terms of the Oxford academic year have been the most intense periods of my college education. This isn’t because I was necessarily thinking any harder than I would at Swarthmore (the challenge of the material I was working with was, on the whole, about equal to the upper-level courses I’ve taken at Swarthmore thus far), but rather because a very significant amount of thinking was condensed into a very short period of time. Writing two essays per week every week for eight weeks is exhausting, particularly when you’re a chronic academic overachiever and write well over the prescribed 1,500-2,000 word essay length. (My essays, on average, were 2,729 words long, with the longest running 5,834 words and the shortest 1,981.) At Swarthmore, I became accustomed to burning out at the end of each academic year; at Oxford, burn-out seemed to occur campus-wide somewhere around the fifth week of each term, with everyone kind of limping along for the remaining three weeks.

In addition to rereading and tabulating my essays, I took a lot of long walks. I drank a lot of beer while sitting in Port Meadow (which, incidentally, was one of President Clinton’s favorite places in Oxford, during his time there). Entirely out of character, I went skinnydipping in a river one evening. I revisited my favorite restaurants. I baked one last loaf of banana bread. In short, I tried to create a mental picture of Oxford independent of anyone in it. As this entry suggests, that was only partially successful.

A month later, I’m still not convinced that I’m ever going to be able to look back on my time at Oxford and (with the exception of my academic work) be truly able to objectively evaluate it. I think, on the whole, that leaving the US and Swarthmore for a year was the right decision for me; it’s too easy to get comfortable at Swarthmore, and at least for me, that comfort became a little suffocating after a while. Oxford was a much-needed change. Are there things I wish I had handled differently? Certainly. But, for what it was, I think I can close the Oxford chapter in my life with the conclusion that, good or bad, I made it through, almost certainly less defectively than I would have had I been at Swarthmore. And I’m not sure I can really ask for much more.

Or, more concisely: in the eternally applicable words of Tom Lehrer, that was the year that was.