It’s the middle of winter, the ground is slippery from being frozen over for maybe the third time this week, and it’s a white tundra outside my university building. I’m walking to class early one morning, face biting from the cold. I’ve started waking up earlier than I used to and sleeping as late as possible. It is my last semester at Queen’s, and the panic sets in like an early morning snowstorm; slowly, but with an ever-consuming drift—the effect is confusing, I don’t really know if I’ll make it out alive.
But I am not thinking about it. Really, I promise. Instead, I have become obsessed with English royal ancestral lines, from Elizabeth the 2nd, all the way back to Victoria: the House of Windsor, originally the House of Saxe-Cobourg and Gotha. I stay awake at night, my heater making a steady white noise, lights dimmed as I read through endless Wikipedia articles; how the Tudor dynasty ends after Elizabeth the 1st dies childless and a virgin, how the line then passes on to James 1st, the son of Elizabeth’s cousin, Mary, whom she executed, giving rise to the House of Stuart.
As a once aspiring history major, my fascination with English royalty is endless. I sometimes wonder if I should have continued studying history, but I had grown tired of people asking “History? But have you thought about what you want to do after?” as if they knew, as if they had all the answers to life figured out. I think back to my first year at uni, and I realize that I still do not know the answer to that question, even though I have since picked a more ‘serious’ major and left my history dreams in the proverbial dust.
The next in line after James the 1st was his son, Charles the 1st, who was a terrible king, and made Parliament so angry that they beheaded him. For a brief time after him, England had no king. But they soon brought Charles’s son back to the throne, and the monarchy continued. I think of this rapid change, this confusion, this conundrum that plagued the English almost four centuries ago, and it feels vaguely familiar.
Sometimes I think I’m too old for this, to feel so lost and bewildered, like a child hanging on to the buckle of someone’s belt, afraid I am going to be left behind. But then again, I guess you never stop feeling like a child. It really is only time that passes; new lineages are born while old ones die, fade into history and become stories we tell one another. Things change, but they also stay the same.
I take a seat at the back of a lecture hall in one of the last courses I am taking in university, and suddenly, I feel lighter. Of course, I realize, there is no way to know what the future holds—but staying in the past doesn’t fix anything either. You just have to let time pass, and maybe, just maybe, everything will be completely fine.