Cambridge wrapped me in its stone arms again yesterday. Walking through the college gates after summer break feels like stepping into someone else’s novel. All those medieval towers reaching into grey September sky, courtyards so green they hurt your eyes. My roommate thinks I’m being dramatic, but how else can you react to this place?
Second year A-levels hit different. Psychology and sociology aren’t just subjects anymore; they’re becoming lenses. Yesterday’s lecture on memory formation made me scribble three pages of story notes instead of actual academic ones. The way trauma reshapes neural pathways, how we edit our own histories without knowing… There’s a novel brewing in these theories.
Unpacked my graphic novels first, obviously. Through the Woods by Emily Carroll, some issues of The Wicked + The Divine I still need to finish, plus this haunting indie comic Vacancy I found in a Moscow bookshop. Nobody’s heard of it. Black and white panels about empty hotel rooms that remember their guests. My sketching supplies too, though I dropped formal art classes last term. Drawing for myself now. Quick character studies in margins, nightmare creatures during boring lectures. The sketchbook knows things my Word documents don’t yet.
Been thinking about what stories need to exist. Not just entertainment, but the kind that crawl under your skin and rearrange something. The kind where psychology textbooks and gothic architecture and ink-stained fingers all somehow connect.
This term feels like standing at a threshold. Student on one side, writer on the other. Maybe both. Maybe that’s the point.
Daria Ryzhikova Writer