The Girl Who Fell to Earth

A freak fall through a rooftop at a college party landed my best friend in a coma. As a deafening silence fell on our friendship I grasped for the words to keep us both breathing.

Illustrations by Esme Blegvad

We leave the birthday party to stand on the balcony and talk about Venice. We’ll be flying there in just a few days, after we turn in our last papers of Hilary term. Under the bright moon hanging above Oxford, Annie glows: She’s wearing her favorite coat, the black wool one with the leopard fur collar. She found it in a small Stockholm shop in December and immediately knew it was meant for her.

Annie often tells me that she has never felt happier or more at home than she has over the past few months. When we meet in October, we are nothing more than strangers with a shared passion for well-worn books – two Barnard students making a home in Oxford, studying literature. As our friendship deepens, we quickly grow to love this old city, where it feels relevant to spend the majority of one’s time reading and writing and thinking about the works of Chaucer and Milton, of Woolf and Joyce. Annie and I share much together over these past few months: shitty first dra…