Note: I apologize for any awkwardness in the recording, I am just getting over a bout of sickness that has affected my voice. Nevertheless, please enjoy.
The chilled, crisp air of London greeted me for the first time as I lumbered through the automatic doors of Heathrow Airport, back hunched under the weight of a backpack and duffel bag. Trailing dutifully behind me, their belabored wheels catching at any imperfection, were two suitcases my mother and I had engineered to meet the weight limit, mere ounces separating them from the ‘oversized’ classification. How much packing is too much for an indefinite amount of time?
Stepping into the morning, I felt disoriented and sleep-deprived, only able to think one or two physical steps ahead. I had no idea where to go and felt weighed down and immobile by my luggage. Still, upon exiting, the air felt refreshing and thankfully odorless (unlike the East Coast I had left behind) and the sky beyond the escalators was pale and clear, not overcast as I had been warned to expect. Never had the word ‘home’ felt so foreign. I have left the United States behind, and I don’t know when I will be back. I don’t know if I want to go back.
As I waited for a local friend to make their way to my terminal, I observed the mass of people coagulating near two solitary lifts. I wondered which of them were on vacation, if anyone among the throng was moving here, too. I wondered which of them might be returning home. It seemed that everyone felt unsure of what they were doing or where they were going. Regardless, they all seemed eager to get there.
The process of lugging my things off and onto trains as we ventured towards North London, where I would be staying for the next week, was onerous. People with headphones in didn’t notice us pushing to get off the train at the correct platform. Panic lurched my stomach into my throat when a suitcase wheel got stuck in the gap between the platform and the train car, or we took too long to get off and my bag became sandwiched between the closing doors. It surprised me how, in these instances, fellow passengers didn’t seem to be annoyed at the two outsiders clumsily wheeling around the lion’s share of my worldly possessions. Many stepped in to help, without being asked, willing to interrupt their days to carry a bag or dislodge a wheel for a stranger.
This struck me, immediately, as markedly different from where I had come, the land of distrust and the home of individualism. I thought back to my first time in Penn Station, emerging onto the platform after art camp with three weeks worth of canvases slung under my arms, unable to make it onto the escalator. Even after I started crying, no one had offered to help (don’t you dare judge fifteen-year-old me, okay? I was just a baby art geek from rural Colorado). In London, my first instinct after someone offered to help with my bag was an expectation they would run off with it if I gave it to them. I finished the journey to Barnet wondering, is London a place where strangers trust each other, assume the best of one another?
For an American like me, there is a deep sense of peace in London. Most of the time, it doesn’t feel like a city twice the size of NYC, but rather a collection of towns strung together. “To call it a city is to miss the point,” my cousin insisted, as we walked towards Hampstead Heath that afternoon. The high rises and packed train cars are anecdotal. The crowded, bustling streets of Chinatown, Soho, and Covent Garden bely enjoyment rather than urgency. And that’s the worst of it. The local feel of London trumps the enormity of it.
For a week before I was allowed to move into my accommodations, I lived with my cousins. At conversations around the dinner table, I began to view London through their eyes, a place where they are raising two young children and building a community of friends and family. I am glad my first impression was not one of transience, but of possibility–what’s on offer is worth settling down here for. Their flat was beautiful, as are all the houses on the street, not ramshackle colonials with peeling paint, but brick houses with gracefully sloped rooftops, decorated with ivy and aging white trim. I’ve been spoiled here (so far) by wonderful weather, the sun beaming through their staggered second floor windows in the afternoon, cheerful voices wafting upwards from the street, never speaking the same language twice.
Overall, the week or so since my arrival has been a study in opposites. I felt energized on very little sleep my first two days, and on the third day it seemed improbable I would ever muster up the energy to crawl out of bed. At long last, I managed to creep out from under the covers, sans flat sheet, and ended up walking around for hours. I stopped by campus, a collection of historic white buildings surrounding Somerset House. These buildings are hundreds of years older than the country I was born in.
After collecting my official visa and student ID, I exited Bush House and found myself overlooking the Thames. Following along the murky waters, time was punctuated by passing runners and the mechanical hum of cherry red double decker buses. I could see the London Eye in the distance, and soon enough, Big Ben.
At specific moments, it is so easy to feel awed by the fact that I now live here. I’ve never lived in a city before, never even visited London. I am starting over, a fact to revel in after the intensely painful events of the past two years. As I approached Westminster Abbey and Big Ben, however, my feelings of fascination and euphoria quickly oscillated to ones of isolation and loneliness. Back in the United States, even in a crowd of strangers, I had something in common with almost everybody. American-ness, a shared cultural context, a portion of my identity in the majority. In London, I cannot reasonably assume that any part of my identity is shared with others in my vicinity. I am the outlier, the strange one, perhaps doing something I don’t realize is wrong or taboo. 2,300 miles has quickly turned into 4,800 miles, half a country into an ocean, away from my family. Distance which has bred desperation in the past is only increasing. My challenge is to develop trust for myself here, in a new city and country, that I didn’t have for myself in a place where it may have been easier to build.
Staring up at the face of Big Ben, stark against the overcast, graying sky, elation turned to terror, sickly sweet oat milk mocha curdled in my stomach and my ears burned so hot I thought they might fall off. Next to me, a line to take pictures at a telephone box wound around the corner out of sight, despite there being hundreds of other, identical boxes to take pictures scattered across London. Locals spoke insistently on the phone as they wended their way through the throng of tourists, who, like me, stood rooted to the spot. Cars and buses rounded the bend at twenty miles an hour, the maximum speed you can travel in London.
I began making my way towards Downing Street.
That night over dinner, I asked my cousins about their impressions of the United States. They told me that everything in the US feels like it’s out of a movie. You get coffee at a diner, you feel like you’re getting coffee at a diner in a movie. If that’s true, being in the UK feels like living through the scenes of a book. Sitting on a bench at St. James’s Park, I waited for Aziraphale and Crowley to come feed the ducks. Walking through Hyde Park, I wondered whereabouts Ross Poldark had challenged Monk Adderley to a duel. I sat on a staircase in a part of London that must be steps away from Becky Sharp’s stomping grounds, and the automated voice on the train later announced our approach to the Baker Street station. When you’re someone who has always idolized books, perhaps it’s easier to feel closer to some emotional truths here. If I’m where these characters were, maybe I’ll see what they saw. Maybe I’ll be able to understand something I didn’t before.
The next day, my fourth in London, I woke up with a sore throat. At first, I wasn’t sure if it was the result of exhaustion or contagion, but by the evening I was starting to experience congestion. The cocktail of jet-lag, which seemed to hit me harder every day, sickness, and sleeping on someone’s couch, living out of suitcases, losing track of what was packed where, depleted me. I started to feel threadbare, and the wear and tear revealed deep gashes in my self confidence. The wonderment at walking down the street, witnessing old world gallantry rubbing shoulders with ultra modernity, skyscrapers abutting brownstones, was more quickly and assuredly overtaken by paranoia. I trod along the sidewalk, head down, afraid to open my mouth because as soon as I spoke, I knew I would reveal myself to be an outsider, and whatever people attributed to my generalized nationality would now be attributed to me as an individual. Even after arriving at my accommodations and finally sleeping the sickness off, these gashes have remained bared, angry and red. I feel lonely and desperate to connect with flat mates and new friends, but when I begin speaking to them, I feel alienated, like we are separated from genunity by a veneer.
I can see what is on offer here, there is no shortage of it, but I’m struggling to get out of my own way.
So, what is the point of this disjointed account of my first week in London? No profound shifts have taken place, one doesn’t arrive at acclimation as soon as they overcome jet lag. I don’t have an inspirational way to wrap this piece in a little bow. I suppose my intention in writing is to express, in my own way, that moving to a new place, let alone a new country, is a process filled with no shortage of emotions. People, places, differences, jump out at you all at once, and there is no one you can turn to to share in the burden, because no one experiences it the same way. I hope that, if anything can be taken from this more informal reflection, for readers who are interested in moving abroad (or not), is that the biggest thing you will be confronted with when you fundamentally shift your reality is yourself. You can travel far away, marvel at famous landmarks you’ve heard about your whole life, but the largesse of these experiences can’t bring you out of yourself. The biggest thing you’ll be forced to confront in a move like this is not immigration, leasing agencies, transportation, or cultural barriers.
But you.
Wherever You Go, There You Are