Down the Rabbit Hole

It's funny how fast something totally new can become so familiar so quickly. How quickly a completely unknown place can so easily feel like home. It's also kind of funny how quickly time can pass. Today is my last day in Cardiff, and it has been 340 days since I moved my entire life to this city at 5.30 in the morning to start my master's degree. Truthfully, it feels like a lifetime ago now, rather than just 11 months. This is my farewell to this city that I have grown to love, and all the people I had the good fortune to meet and spend those days with.  Looking back, it’s odd what I remember most about my first day in this city. What my overwhelmed senses identified that day. The ache in my body as my friend and her daughter walked me across this then unfamiliar city back to my new home. My first night in Cardiff tasted like cheap tomato sauce from the frozen pizza I cooked for dinner. It sounded like awkward laughter between a group of strangers. It felt fragile almost, l...

 Today I saw my grandma again. I looked at my grandma's old bungalow on Google maps street view, the house where she lived for over twenty years of her life. It says 'Image captured July 2011'. There is a window open in her bedroom. It is still her bungalow, she is still alive, I am still living next door to her in the old grey hall she lived in before me, and I will cross the invisible border between our gardens through the dirt path I'd carved out over the years in the shrubbery. And when I arrive she will be sitting in her armchair in her living room, the patio door already slid open to let me in, smiling and waving and maybe a little bit smaller than she was a couple of years ago. We will eat her raisin shortbread biscuits and play Boggle and drink her homemade lemonade and there will have been no pandemic, no other deaths, no unsteady feet. And I won't know how perfect it is and I won't go back and say, even if I could, because sometimes it's best not t...

Lockdown restrictions have started to ease over the past week or so, and I've had a lot of weird feelings about it. Mostly because it's been so long since I've experienced the 'old' normal things like going out shopping or for a meal in a restaurant or drinks at the pub with my friends. When the pandemic first happened, and the first lockdown was announced last March, I spent weeks mourning the 'old normal' whilst struggling to adjust to this new way of life that we were suddenly thrust into. It's weird now to think that something I've mourned will come back. But mostly, this week I've struggled because whilst going out again is allowed and shopping and trips to the pub are coming back, some things in my life aren't. Because whilst the world tentatively starts to step towards how life used to be before the covid pandemic (though it looks very different naturally), that doesn't change the fact my grandma is gone. Everything I mourned in th...

A year ago this week, life as I knew it changed. It happened in stages, moments, over a span of days and three hundred and sixty five days later I'm still trying to make sense of it all. It's been a long year, and I'm a rubbish poet, but I didn't know how else to express what I've been feeling and thinking the past few days.  365 Days Marie Monday was normal, a side by side, elbows touching kind of normal, nothing  extraordinary back then; But incredibly rare these days. We watched clips of Carrie, no face masks, just the human shield I made out of my fingers over my eyes. I glimpsed through the cracks the figure of a  blood soaked girl, a grim premonition to end the last normal lecture I'd ever have. I'm going home, whilst I can,  one of my course-mates told me after, and I haven't seen her since.  Crime on Tuesday was cancelled Temporarily , the email said, 365 days later I am in another city, and we are still online. I stood with my supervisor in her ...

  Stay safe. Those words follow me around these days, niggling in my mind. They appeared at the start of the pandemic, when we realised those three weeks of lockdown would last so much longer than we thought. As roads emptied and city centres closed, trapped inside with eyes glued to the screen watching the death toll rise and rise and rise. Stay safe.  It's become a mantra, a background thought, a reflex that ends every conversation I have now.  Stay safe, I signed off in every email to my lecturers as I floundered and battled to finish my degree last spring. Stay safe, I told my grandma over skype, not knowing five days later she would be dead. Stay safe, I told my best friend, as we lingered over the porch of her student house, on the precipice of being separated for who knew how long. (it's been 8 months now, since I saw her last). Stay safe, I think to the young mother walking with her baby in the park, marveling how she managed to bring something so innocent and bea...