Absent

A friend is in London on a training course.  She posts beautiful pictures that affect me physically.  I can see one of those images - the view from Primrose Hill, for instance, and the sight of it blooms in my gut like an ache, a physical loss.

I hate that I feel as if I'm in exile from London, because I know, I just know it sounds absurd and pretentious.  It's not my country.  I don't know it or understand it as a local, because I was always and ever just a visitor.  I cringe when non-Southerners claim to luuuv gumbo and wisteria and I know in my soul they don't have a clue what they are talking about, so I'm painfully aware I'm on non-native ground.

But, in the past, when I go to London, something fits.  The air smells right, my skin does well in the climate, the sound of the traffic, the accents, the echo of thousands of years of literature soothes.  Some unhappiness that sits in my chest eases in London, in church pews and museums and pubs and wine shops and car boot sales and underground stations and Marks & Spencers.  I have at least lived there, alongside natives.  I can identify a Bramley apple and pronounce both Greenwich and Ipswich correctly and really, it's a Marathon bar and Smarties, not Snickers and M&Ms.  I have some minimal street cred, some time on the ground.

Habermas Girl is in Italy.  She posts pictures that make me madly jealous.  I would LOVE to go to Italy, I would hock my last pearl, and maybe someday I will own enough pearls that hocking them would mass enough coin for a trip.  I have memories of lying in a churchyard in Florence in the spring, picking tiny white flowers and soaking up sunshine and feeling as if no one could ever be discontent in Italy.  I long to go.

But I don't think it would ease me the way London could.  There's something about the character of London that appeals, the humor and the reserve and the oldness and the oddness of things.

A friend came to dinner two weeks ago and was flying out to London the next day.  I must have gotten that wistful look on my face as we talked about it, and my husband knows what it is to me, and how long it has been since I've been there, felt that ease, and he very sweetly said he'd give up the new tires we need if it meant I could go to London.  Awww.  Ludicrous, of course,  because we absolutely have to have new tires, we won't survive the winter without them, and of course the money for tires would never cover an entire trip to London.  It was like saying, I'll go without dinner so you can buy a new car.

Perhaps I'm over-romanticizing the country's effect on me.  That's likely, given my penchant for romanticizing.  Eleven years ago, I came back from the UK and moved to Chicago.  It was hard.  I'd left all my friends behind and shown up in a town where I knew no one and it was just going to get colder.  I worked as a temp in an investment firm, I got cast in a campy, silly sketch show.  I thought dispassionately about how much easier being magically dead would be to having to re-create myself piece by piece.  Not that I wanted to harm myself, but "not being" at the time sounded better than "being", which felt messy and sad and painful and lonely.

For Christmas I asked my parents for money to go to the UK at New Year's.  They were very sweet, and smiled, and said no.

And I went anyway.  It was the best decision I could possibly have made. (I charged it, and worked 7 days a week for 8 weeks when I got back to pay for it.)  I was serenely, blissfully, magnificently happy for about 9 days.  Coming back again was dreadful, of course, but I had managed to prove to myself that being that horribly unhappy was temporary.  No, more than that, I could lift that veil any time I wanted to, with just a plane ticket.

Time has passed, and the scales are much more even now.  I can't say for sure where my happiness lives anymore.  Is it somewhere in London?  Or are the relationships I made there less important now than the ones I have here?

Or is there some secret harmonic at work there, some resonance fills me up no matter who is there?  And if there is, how long will it be until I can go relax into it, lie back and let myself be finally at ease?