At the railway station, I purchase picture postcards, fifteen pence apiece. College crests, turreted roofs, checkerboard lawns. Punters propelling cheerful couples up and down the Thames. They make it look so elegant, so easy.

Here’s one of the Radcliffe Camera. Home to the Bodleian History Faculty Library, an imposing repository for more than two thousand years of accumulated scholarship. The original Ivory Tower, its lofty dome dominates the city skyline.

I did not go inside the Radcliffe Camera. But it doesn’t matter.

Months have passed since you stopped speaking to me. Still, on the back of the card, I write a note in small, careful cursive:

              Oxford is a bunch of old buildings & books, “such stuff as dreams are made 
              on”. The papers I came here to see are so fragile, I could only read them on a 
              microfilm machine tucked in a back hallway. After 3 hours, I walked out of the 
              archive & back to the convent guesthouse. For the rest of the week, I 
              listened to nuns pray & birds sing, watched raindrops roll across my window, 
              sat in the garden under the magnolia tree, just beginning to blossom.
              You were right. After all those years of imagining this place, it’s good that I 
              finally came here. Now I know I don't need to come back.

I do not mail this postcard. But it doesn’t matter. It wasn’t really for you anyway.