BEFORE I DIE, I PRAY TO BE BORN | ✓

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THURSDAY
20 NOVEMBER, 1996
ISAIAH

               I spent all my life planning an escape from Halsett but now all I want is to go back. As I pull into the car park of my building in Banbury, weights lodge into all the gaps in my body where a man my age is supposed to have muscle.

The city only shows me its worst face.

Though maybe it's not entirely fair to put the blame on it and none on myself. A GCSE history lesson comes to mind, an anecdote of an art installation displayed in Paris supposedly depicting Cairo. The French fawned over its beauty only to travel to Egypt and baulk when it was unable to live up to the expectations of their exotic oriental escape.

I was seven when I decided to come to Oxford.

Dorian's eldest brother had just started his degree and Dorian showed me pictures of the campus and Rueben in his robe. The Gothic architecture enchanted me at once. If places like this existed in the real world and not just fiction, I had to see them for myself. What could take me further from Suffolk than the hearth of academics and fitted black clothing?

The delicate spires reaching for the sky and lancet windows never lost their charm, but in hindsight, I would've been just as content going to any university — more content, even. Getting into uni would've been an accomplishment without it being a prestigious one, and I would've been able to enjoy it more if I wasn't so worried about fitting into the narrow descriptors of an Oxbridge student. Maybe I would've even made a friend or two.

When people asked me why I wanted to go to Oxford, my response was: it's what I've always wanted. It was what I always wanted...

But why? Pure habit.

The stench of cigarettes is the only thing to greet me at the door. I cough and cover my mouth with my arm as I stride across the apartment to open a window. Hanging out of it, I breathe the crisp winter air. It pinches my nose with each inhale but it's preferable when juxtaposed with the nausea stirred by ageing tobacco.

How did I never realise the smell was so strong? At what point did my brain stop registering it altogether? And how did Dorian manage to stay here overnight? He hated it and he stayed anyway. Have I always been this self-absorbed?

I'm slow to turn around. The flat waits for me exactly as it was when we left: one of my sliders face down by the door, the chair where I sat while Dorian packed pulled out, a half-smoked cigarette waiting in the apple marmalade jar I use — or used, hopefully — as an ashtray.

June Jordan's Selected Love Poems on the table.

I approach it with weak knees. Lowering myself on the chair that waits for me, I pick it up, and, with quivering hands, part the collection in the middle.

Despite being a hardcover, the spine puts up no resistance and the opening embraces me with cypress and chamomile. How many times has Dorian held this for his scent to imprint onto it so intensely?

The poem I've landed on is called It's About You: On The Beach where Dorian has underlined the words: a colour / yours is orange. With a lump growing in my throat, I turn to the previous page where he has marked the lines within our love the world / looks like a reasonable easy plan with a note in the margin. "I love you." That's all it says.

Fanning through the collection, I see these on every page. There is no analysis in his annotations; they consist of underlines, love confessions, and short memories from our life that always end with "do you remember?"