London
Note: names have been changed for privacy
There’s a scene in the movie Paddington 2 where the namesake, Paddington, has recently broken out of jail, after being put there on some shady information provided by a menacing Hugh Grant. Paddington — a lovable talking bear who tries to find his way in the world but keeps getting into trouble — escapes with the help of his new inmate friends and makes a call from a phone booth in an alley in what can only be presumed to be a rough part of East London.
If you look closely behind Paddington, just for a second, you’ll see the words Bear With Me graffitied on the wall in bright yellow letters. That is my joke, and that was my alley.
Our flat was easy to miss. It sat above an HVAC company with the Dundee Arms pub on one side and Satan’s Whiskers cocktail bar on the other. Our alley snaked west, away from Cambridge Heath Road, and if you went up the stairs and through the public housing estate, you landed right across from the fish and chips place on Bethnal Green, saving you a four minutes walk. The alley itself had piss, needles, and not infrequently a burning trash can, but our flat was cozy and clean and perfect. The living room had big white walls with a built-in bookshelf, filled with art books and poetry and bits of people who had lived there in the past. I left a funny book about etymology, and a pamphlet about the Basquiat exhibit at the Barbican on that shelf. There was a huge window that looked over Cambridge Heath with the V&A Museum of Childhood just across, next to York Hall, which would bring swarms of east enders to our corner on boxing nights. Ewan and I used to stare out the window, making up their conversations.
The flat had two rules: 1) if you were in the kitchen you had to play soccer mom radio out of the small blue transistor, and 2) if you were making tea you had to boil enough for the rest of the household.
My bedroom had a double bed, a skinny ikea dresser, a nightstand, and about one square foot of standing space. When I laid down, my head was directly left of a vent that ended up at face level in the alley, so I could hear whatever people were talking about below. I often tried to shout back advice for my own amusement.
They’re closed by now. Try the chicken shop two blocks up.
No bitch, I think you’re the one who check her priorities.
Just go down on her more, mate.
The tube stops running in 8 minutes, guys.
Our flat had a little outdoor nook that could just barely fit three of us, and only when one of us was halfway back indoors against the laundry machine. We’d stand in the dark drizzle, cup of tea in hand. Gemma would roll cigarettes and we’d talk about her crazy best friend in art school, Alice, who can’t be blamed for her behavior because she’s just so Italian.
Ewan and Erica’s room was directly above the Dundee Arms, and because the bar had DJ sets every weekend and according to them the weekend starts on Thursday, we often ran into problems. Asking them to turn it down was an unsustainable solution, so we went for an equally unsustainable and much more testosterone-filled direction of sending Ewan to climb onto the roof and scramble halfway down their pipe to steal their disco ball.
On Saturday mornings we would walk along the canal to Broadway Market or the Columbia Road Flower Market, passing the giant gasometers and endless rows of boat homes and sleepy warehouses. Industry still took weekends over there, unlike in America. Broadway Market had stand after stand of treasures to dig through, with boxes of painstakingly collected records and racks of clothes, antique housewares that may have lived in an aristocratic estate before they went broke and sold it all, jellied eels and hot, spicy laksas and fresh meat pasties and six places that will sell you a pint or a cup of tea or more likely both.
I grew up with tea. Mom always had a huge box that took up a whole shelf, and then some others stashed haphazardly throughout the kitchen. I can smell the difference between an oolong and a puh’ere and a rooibos and an assam. As it turns out, there are only two kinds of tea in England: builder’s tea and posh tea. Builder’s tea is black and you get it in 160-packs from Tesco for £4.90 and you drink it twice or three times a day, steeping for a minute before pouring in some milk and swishing it around, not bothering with a spoon. Posh tea is in decorative tins with carousels and flags or coats of arms on them, found in the bright premises of Harrods or Fortnum and Mason’s, stacked delicately alongside biscuits in even more decorative tins that you use and re-use. Posh tea is just for occasions and grandparents.
The thing about being somewhere for a year is that you are always leaving. Every new friend I made, every new place I went had an urgency to it, an acceleration, a this might be the only time I’m here, or a should I bother getting to know her, or a I have to spend as much time as I can in this moment because time is scarce floating just below the surface.
What I love most about London is that it is not one city, but six or seven or maybe even fifteen, cobbled together on top of each other, somehow co-existing. It’s sitting for charcoal-sourdough pizza in corners of refurbished trains in Hackney; it’s eating oxtail curry and listening to steel drums on the street in the proud and colorful and delicious Brixton; it’s dancing in a Colombian club held on the second floor of the Elephant and Castle mall; it’s wandering the old-fashioned and timeless Finsbury park and Hampstead Heath in tweed and boots; it’s biking along Trafalgar Square and St. James park feeling the weight of their regality; it’s sitting in a cozy old pub in Dalston debating whether the painting on the wall looks like Stephen Fry or what Olivia Coleman will win an award for next. It’s trying to buy weed from a guy who is “Ted’s friend” in the parking lot of the council estate up the stairs from the alley in Bethnal Green and realizing you got into the wrong car and that was a close one. It’s spending the better part of three months in the British Library, with its spiral stairs and enormous bookshelf that extends upward eight floors from the ground. It’s bookstores on every other block and nosebleed tickets to see David Tennant in Don Juan at a cramped theater in the West End. It’s rain. Buckets of rain. It’s getting to a point where the rain doesn’t stop you from doing anything anymore, not even standing outside for hours to watch Shakespeare at the Globe on your birthday in the £5 standing section just as it’s meant to be seen.
London has forgotten me by now, but I will never forget her. I had never been anywhere before where I could be every version of myself, and it takes a city like London to find that out. I looked for signs I belonged and created them when I couldn’t find them. Filling my small Ikea dresser with tweed and dark knits and raincoats. Getting on a first-name basis with the old greek couple who ran the fish and chips shop and the pair of brothers who ran the produce market on my block. Wrapping up in blankets on the couch of our big living room, watching Bakeoff. Spending every Sunday afternoon at a community center held in an elementary school, cooking rice and stew for 80 people with Nigerian music blasting in the kitchen, where I made art and friends and cakes and learned chess from a 70-year-old Polish man they called The Fox. Dropping my R’s every once in a while and adding “keen” and “was sat” and “reckon” into my vocabulary. Getting a library card. Learning queue etiquette and tube etiquette and becoming impatient with others for not knowing it. Apologizing to lamp posts that I got in the way of, and to people who cut in front of me. Squeezing onto the Central line like sardines. Climbing up the side ladder from inside our flat on warm days, gingerly stepping onto the roof’s soft asphalt, settling down on a blanket with a pitcher of Pimm’s, watching the overground trains pass by. Standing on a small stage in the basement of a bar in Shoreditch, portraits of Noel Fielding on the walls, participating in a pun competition alongside six other brave souls, and I hear someone whisper, “I didn’t know they did puns in America” and feeling proud, though I also felt instantly insane for signing up for this and am so much worse than anyone else but somehow held my own for two hours of adrenaline-fueled utter nonsense. Complaining about the bagels on Brick Lane and eating them anyway because they’re the only bagels in town and there’s no way I could go a year without bagels.
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The last photo I took in London was with you, of course. I was leaving on Friday morning and we were both devastated and it couldn’t be helped. We cried together for days, knowing it was the end of us, feeling like there was too little time and we needed more of each other than we could ever have. I sometimes wonder if you understood why I left, why I had to go and had to go then.
There is no way for me to think about London without thinking about you, and I am grateful for that. We went on dates every week, switching off who was surprising who. I took you to a pop-up American-style carnival in Shepherd’s Bush park, only to find out that you hated rides and roller coasters and we couldn’t do any of it. We got cotton candy and you said, “how about the dodgems” and I had no idea what you meant. You repeated dodgems and I still had no idea what you meant. You pointed to the bumper cars and I broke down laughing. What a metaphor for the difference between your culture and mine; in yours you try to dodge and in mine you try to smash and in practice it ends up being the same.
When we talked three years later, you asked me if I remembered our trip to Brighton. Of course I do. We met your friends Claire and Harry for tapas and crashed some friend of a friend’s birthday party and hiked in the hills in the rain. We rented an air bnb and played my first and only game of dungeons and dragons, and all of you laughed at me when I tried to do a British accent, which is fair enough because it was terrible, and I laughed at me too. We made sushi and you spilled soy sauce on the carpet and I tried to scrub it out but that only made the stain grow. You told me you loved me that night and I couldn’t say it back. It was too early and you were the first and I didn’t want you to be the first because I knew how little time we had and because I still thought about Jake every day even though I didn’t mean to so it didn’t feel right. I hated that I couldn’t say it back, even though you were so devastatingly kind about it. A few weeks later I tried, and you were so excited, and I’m not sure at what point I started meaning it, but I did, and it became so easy. By that time we were counting down, becoming more and more painfully aware of how little time five months is. Most couples know when it is the beginning, and some know when it is the end, but if you know when the end is from the beginning, you become painfully aware of the middle. In June and July this is the middle, this is the height. It’s a strange knowledge to hold. As July turned into August and August turned into September, I felt you pushing me away, hoping that if you could make me mad or annoyed it would be easier. It wasn’t.
I remember our last moment together. It was unbearable, how mundane a day it was. How the world kept going on and you still had to catch the 7:18 bus to go to work and everyone around us had a normal weekday pace while we were stopped here in time, at the corner of Tarling and Sutton, in the iconic gray gloom of a London fall morning. We held each other for as long as we could on that corner, magnets in front of your apartment building, whispering I love you again and again. I peeled away first because I knew you couldn’t do it, and you had to go and you weren’t going to be late on account of me. You kissed me on the forehead one last time and I squeezed your hand and I turned around. I had to move, I couldn’t stay on that corner because that corner was for you and me and as of half a second ago there was no more you and me.
I walked into the Shadwell overground station cafe for a bland coffee and was shocked by how even my voice was, when I felt I was barely there. I stood outside the brick station, missing a train and the next one, not able to get on, not wanting to be gone yet. I had braced myself for the month I was to leave, for the week. I had known the date for weeks. But I hadn’t prepared for the morning hours and minutes and second between when I was awake and when I had to leave. I sobbed as the train pulled into Bank Station and I sobbed as I pushed through the thousands of commuters to get on the Central line and I sobbed all the way to Heathrow and through security and to my gate until there were no more tears my body could produce. I got on my plane and put on the same playlist I had made when I came to London in the first place, with a heavy rotation of the Clash and the Kinks and Blur and now filled with songs you gave me. That playlist started a year earlier with what I thought I knew of London and ended with what I had come to know about her — her softness, her multiplicity, her overwhelm, her depth.
