"I used to meet Americans in town who'd mistake me for one of them, and to my horror even now I still sometimes slip into that vernacular."

In answer to your other question--every night.

I am dark-eyed every morning, and yes they often assume it's from the books, and yes that happens, but it's not always the case. They are lying on the floor now, those books, and I only ever slept on the floor twice, and you know all about that already – you came in here that last night in December when we were all together in Oxford, you saw my walls were bare, my things were hauled up three flights into storage, you saw my backpack against the desk, you saw his by the chair. You sat yourself on the frame of my bed, looking at my mattresses on the floor and the empty bottle of white from the night before, though not at wine glasses (since I have nothing more than one mug, one plate, one set of cutlery, being markedly alone when we are apart). You saw me already picking up his clothes to wear myself, as has become my habit, and you saw him.

I had already told you eight weeks' worth of stories centred on this bearded character, and every time I hear from him I add a little more to my cache and play off that for days. I used to meet Americans in town who'd mistake me for one of them, and to my horror even now I still sometimes slip into that vernacular. At least I had something to entertain them with, when their powers of deduction eventually kicked in. I'm not Californian, but I could tell you a story or two to make up for the momentary deception, unintentional and inconceivable as it was.

Behind my computer screen these days there are two things pinned to the book shelf and the sliding panel below it: a calendar quickly made out of a post-it which only goes up to five weeks from now, and a picture of him taken on the last night we were together.

He's lying on his back, and he's naked, though the picture only shows his face and chest, and he's looking up at me, not at the lens. There are pictures of me from the same night, some with him, and some without, but still bare-breasted and pale and red-cheeked in both. I had spent four weeks of nights reaching out to a bare back, resting my cheek against his cool shoulder blade and sleeping in the angles of his body where the space curls for curves to fit. He was long, and was boxed by beds that didn’t let him dangle his feet off the end. We would wake up for a few seconds several times in the night muffling and mumbling quietly under the sheets as we settled ourselves into each other with minimal consciousness, just tactile and sensate, placing long limbs around soft lines, and a warm, common membrane. He would pull me in closer, shield his body around mine, cocoon the covers around us and breathe deeply against the nape of my neck. Well, he left. And a week later so did I.

But that night when I went, for the first time in a month, to a shared bed now emptied, I slept fitfully, waking many times in the night, expecting him to be there, and finding nothing.

Our 'Greatest Hits' replay on the screwy, static-enhanced radio station that is my over-indulgent brain. Neither of us ever had much money, evidently, but when we met in the real world we went to restaurants and were as public and real as our surroundings, though we tended to order by price rather than choice. At the sushi bar the Glaswegian waiter took our order and said, "You realise this is a ridiculously small amount of food, don't you?" I ate mostly out of the ginger bowl, and we shared a mug of miso. After that we ordered a bunch of California rolls, not to seem stingy or appropriate or anything.

There are other frames of memory that I go back to often, to the outlines and the small details that are specific for me, but vague in actual function or reality. He often looked like a criminal when we went out, since he really was unused to the drastic and versatile weather conditions of Western Scotland, and compensated by thick boots and a black come-catch-me beanie. We went out one night to Ho-Wah and sat in the closet-sized takeout partition closed in by cheap wooden walls and tacky oriental prints, the benches haphazard with tabloid papers that he picked through with interest, like some intrepid explorer looking into the mouth of a dark, unfathomable cave, but finding the subculture only as deep as the ink that rubbed off on his hands. He asked me questions about local sports that I couldn’t answer, being neither too local by this point, shamefully Anglicised and Americanised, and never really having had the esoteric knowledge in the first place. In the corner of the ceiling there was a small, muted television turned to STV which showed an anthropomorphic robot playing the violin. The lady behind the till took both calls and cash from interior customers, and shouted out in Chinese to the staff behind the screen. Our order came back to us in £18 worth of weight and white paper packages tied up in a white plastic bag with red lettering on the side. It was cold outside when we walked back in the dark. These are my memories, although it is likely that the reality was different, they may well have faded into sentimental recollection along with the rest that you see now, pinned individually onto the space above my bed. When I first arrived here in October everyone used to look at these photos and ask me who he was, including you, but now they think they know all the stories there are to tell. View now each happy Wolfson cell, furnished separately and coincidentally with the same things to the same specifications, and still so radically different. The cleaner who comes every Thursday morning at nine to vacuum the floor and wipe down the sink while I'm in Greek hardly sees me in the flesh, but knows from the photographs on the walls and the specific books on my shelves what I am, and what I have.

The walls of 127 are cream, and the room is a box, with a mattress and no sheet, a sink in the corner closed over by a door, two windows, and in the other corner a lamp shining against a silky screen that has focused in on another room five thousand miles to the west. If the cream room is light, this second room is in darkness. There is not so much to be seen through the screen, and the blue-green tint of the images it gives. Sometimes it angles directly through an open door to a bright white bathroom and the toilet against the far wall. Sometimes the door is closed, or the light is off, or both. There is a box against the left side of the screen that was not there a few months earlier. I remember walking through these images. I remember the smell, and the way the shadows were arranged, and the way the carpet felt underfoot – not at all like most. It sank more, and made a little nestling of a noise around the sole, and seemed uneven in patches. In reality these walls are cream too, but covered, mostly, by posters. There is a sliding glass door that opens onto a small veranda. From here you can see through the trees into the other units of the apartment complex directly adjacent. The lower one has a grill with a plant pot on top which, to the corner of the eye, or an enhanced natural high, looks like a fat man with a hat. There is a small kitchen with a warm fridge. Above the sink there is a small window with blinds that shows the entrance to the front door, and a view of who passes through. There is a bathroom, with a tall, wide mirror, and a showerhead too low for its owner. When he stands under it, he slicks his hair back, gangster-like, and closes his eyes under the stream. He pushes me out of the way. He has his brown back to me with wide shoulders paring down to a smooth, slim waist, and pointed, sharp hipbones that graze against his guest’s inner thigh. He seems stretched out and looming, arching his back under the water to wash himself, ducking down for a basic necessity, exposing the small triangle of disappearing hair at the nape. We slip around each other and I lean my head back facing away from the water to keep the hair out of my eyes as it slicks down my shoulders and back, breasts raised as I attain my own arched posture. Little red hairs were left in his shower long after I had. When I open my eyes his are drawing lines down my belly before we grab for balance against the slippery shower wall and find no way to overcome a marked height difference in such pertinent but perilous circumstances. We never did quite work that out. Instead we tend to cut that part as short as possible and run out leaving trails of towel and watery footprints on that sticky, sinking floor. I think about that when I see the bathroom in the background of his projected face against my midevening screen. He comes to me delayed, out of sync with his lips, acknowledging that time's against us for sure. Bandwidth runs out in time for me to avoid angry emails from the college tech, and I pull the Ethernet cable roughly from my laptop's side as Skype disconnects.

We know exactly what we're missing, and we know how long a two and a half month absence really is. We're counting the days until we can finally stop the solo sex, the ears pricked for living vicariously, the 'what-would-you-do-if-you-were-here' conversations taking place with me half hanging out my window to catch some signal. We're waiting for times when fucking isn't illicit, or at least implicit, and we have control over our own post-coital affairs, not stuck in an all female dorm to ache the walls down with muffled but escaping groans, or else shushing each other in my room at home while silently cursing the creaks of my wide bed as my dad slippers out into the hallway each night to put off the light. Mostly in Oxford, we - you and I, and the others - wait, pray, for the end because it's a basic reprieve, but you have to understand – I'm waiting for something that is due me.

Men with rectangular glasses at the Isis or boys with bad facial hair from Greek MILC would sometimes buy me drinks in bars and clubs. One made me guess his name as he did so. I never kept these advances a secret from the Californian, and he seemed to like that he had something over which others unwittingly competed: he was never at danger of being upstaged. The Oxford night scene can be, unsurprisingly, lavish and luxuriant, with balls and formal hall aplenty. Yes balls, indeed – you know it better than I do. You're part of the Union – you’ve been courted by the hacks. For me it was almost pointless, as I seemed to become unlikely prey where I didn't want to hunt myself, and as each night wore on under the clouds of cheap drinks and formulaic lines, I'd think of the alternative life I have, and urge it on all the sooner in order to escape this endless stream of parties and coked-out youth of self-appointed intelligentsia. All of our bad parties tend to congeal into one endless stream of nightclub queues and walks home in the dark with indie 'classics' dogging me back on the mouths of drunken comrades-in-arms. I keep my stash in the left boot at the bottom of my two-doored closet in 127, and when I have time to waste an evening I open both windows and perch out the one from which I occasionally have dirty conversations and peer stonily down into the same, unmovable pile of bricks and upturned wheelbarrows on the very edge of the college grounds, and I'm always chilled to the bone by the end of my leisure. This window sill has seen the best and worst of times, the mild and the mildly annoying: nights like these; milk, kept cool enough outside in the winter months, blown off the edge; four a.m. wake up calls of retching out the window because it was slightly closer than the sink; compounded transatlantic phone bills from the only pool of reception. Ultimately it's still a place of singular stretched-out contemplation, oddly caught on its own boundary, since when I stand there bent over under the sash, my legs touch the hot radiator below my hips, and my upper half is kept cold by the English nighttimes.

I composed a lot of letters that I never sent, and had a lot of conversations in my head that never happened, all explaining what we both knew, I guess, and had talked about at length: that it had to be this way and there was no point fighting it, that it could only have ever worked like this, and that it did work. I don't know, I mean, I spend a lot of my time writing out tables of nouns and verbs, syntactical doo-dads, and I often find myself coming to the conclusion that writing things down is only meant for securing something in the mind by way of repetition. Hence, I suppose, the repetition and direct recall of events previous to this present state. They've become episodes, set pieces, now, instead of the stream-of-conscious salaciousness out of which they crept. But yes, they're suppressed somewhat by the deliberate brain-washing I submit myself to in order to become so implicitly in tune with these ancient languages that my old problems can finally give way to more advanced ones. I never said that I didn't make some questionable choices. I'm often reduced to stripping the days off my make-shift calendar greedily sharp-eyed and responsive to their imminent passing. I'm not unhappy here. Each one of us made a sacrifice of some kind.

I told you this story once, I think:

I had woken up after the dust storm from my drunken stupor not knowing what time it was. Everyone else was asleep. I found him in his jeans and a long sleeved black t-shirt inside the van with the doors wide open, so I climbed inside and on top of him, and shook him awake. We shared a packet of rice cakes together before he fell asleep again, and in the morning he would tell me he had no recollection of it at all. I left him and wandered on the playa in mostly his clothes and my dust encrusted skin and hair, and eventually the darkness dispelled for me to watch the sun rise on my own, sitting deep in the freshness the white-out had left in its wake. The heat was quickly fierce and the light was becoming whiter and whiter, tempering my resolve to be back with him and the others, away from a vagrant path and back in common territory.

Standing up at length I met an old man behind me who touched my cheeks and neck, asking me where I was going, and whether I would like to come back with him. I said, "I'd really rather not," also saying a word or two about the black-sleeved beast.
"Where is he now?" His fingers touched my collar bone.
"At our camp." He let go of me.
"You’d better go back to him, then."
I did. When I returned, he was awake and said what we each now say every time we speak.

"I miss you a lot," I was looking at his image on my screen, delayed, always delayed, and out of sync with his lips, "you know?"
"I know," he said, "I miss you too."