Staring in wonder at the black sky on my one-way, red-eye flight to London, I look to the hundreds of stars dotting the canvas of the vast nothingness, alone and unsure of everything to come. I ask the stars for answers they cannot give: what will these next four months bring, where may my life go, and what am I to do when the small world I lived in is turned upside down?
I run up the stairs of a red double-decker bus, stumbling and grabbing onto the rail alongside four girls I have only just met. We race to the top before the bus jerks and we all fall, laughing with our McDonald’s in hand after several rounds of cider at an Irish pub and a vicious game of Picolo.
I sit on the left side of a car with no wheel in front of me, watching the face of someone who only a month ago was a complete stranger, existing his entire life thus far on the other side of the world from me. He drives us through the English countryside of Surrey and swears to me that beans on toast is somehow delectable, and I must try it if he makes it for me.
The Preface
“I guess you’re in London today, and I don’t want to need you this way.”
When the moments are all over, they come back in flashes through rose-colored lenses, jumping through time and handpicking memories worth remembering. The short-term moments become fuzzy, and the long-term ones remain until they too fade as the memories are gradually retrieved less. Memory is strange in that way; moments we swear we will remember forever as defining turning points grow hazy, as we ourselves do physically and mentally, and we grip and clutch tighter as they go nonetheless.
This is what I struggle with in the aftershocks of the four months that redefined my entire life. I continually find myself wishing for moments back, even as they were happening. I would look at things extra hard, ultra aware of the impermanence, and I would fight to remember every small nuance to perfection.
There are two songs by Taylor Swift with lyrics I will interweave through my revisiting of these engraved experiences to understand myself through this past defining year of my life, shifting into an entirely new person amalgamated with new everything: “Come Back… Be Here,” and “So Long, London.” These were released at very different points of her discography, yet they both illustrate a kaleidoscope reflecting the elasticity of my own life as I experience, remember, and change. But, to understand this, I need to go back to the start.
The Prologue
“The delicate beginning rush, the feeling you can know so much without knowing anything at all.”
The year is 2025 at the start of the Christmas season, and I eagerly wait in the lobby of the eVisa biometric screening several stories up in New York City for my number to be called. I had to go up alone, as only visa applicants are permitted through the tight-knit security line, certainly symbolic of the next couple of months I will spend in an entirely new country leaving everything I had known behind. It took me hours to do the visa application, and this was the final puzzle piece needed before I am cleared to study and intern in the United Kingdom.
Of course, my family’s Christmas presents to me center on my impending trip to England, with my littlest sister giving me a small plushie of those iconic red telephone booths with a dainty smiley face. My fashionable high school sister gives me Pinterest-inspired rain boots, an amenity I have not owned in years but will certainly value in the rainy London weather. My mom and dad give me a trench coat, which I will also need to fit in with the European-chic style and keep warm in the cold of a London January after attending school in the sunshine state of Florida for the past three years. Among the hums of Christmas spirit were a few standouts: I receive a guide book, a staple pair of jeans (which will end up being seen in every one of my Instagram posts), and a body strap my mom determined I must wear to protect my passport from European pickpockets (I never did wear it, in case you had not already guessed).
Before I know it, the bell has struck and it is the new year. And on January 5th, I leave the country I have never left for longer than a week, for what? I don’t know exactly what awaits, but I feel the adventure and adrenaline bubbling under my skin. There is no feeling quite like knowing you are in the good old days as it is happening. There is nothing like feeling in your bones the immense change you are about to witness, and looking back to myself in that window seat stationed in Newark Liberty Airport prepping for takeoff, I truly think that even if I possessed a looking glass to see what the next portion of my life would bring, I would not have believed what I was going to see.
The Beginning
“Every breath feels like rarest air.”
I arrive in Heathrow with two girls in my program who I had just met, who would go on to become two of the four people with whom I would travel to eight different countries, spend at least a hundred nights out far past a reasonable hour, talk to people of all different dialects and nationalities, see tons of landmarks and museums and monuments, and make a million memories with.
I still remember those early days, as we lugged our three suitcases each onto the narrow seating of the tube, then trudged through torrential rain as we made our way to our place, with pure excitement keeping the laughter and smiles on our faces through it all. I remember our first walk through Hyde Park, exploring the city we would call home for hours on that first day, fighting off jet lag and going out to pubs to find some British men to show us around.
Our first Friday out as a group was one to be remembered. We went from pubs to bars to clubs, grappling between drinking games in the kitchen of our shared flats, meeting Bulgarians and Germans and Ukrainians at the Imperial College drinking spot, traversing between the tube and double decker buses while getting lost over and over again, and eating lamb chops cooked by another person in the program around 6 a.m. after a night of turning newly-formed friendships into ones that felt age-old. And somehow, the whole group of us muscled our way to the final tour of orientation week at the Houses of Parliament at 10 a.m., fighting to stay standing while taking in the magnificent Victorian architecture.
Over the course of the next few months, we had many nights like that combined with days of exploring and adventuring after bright and early next mornings. We were machines, sucking up every minute to crystallize into a memory, taking in as much as we could, never knowing when any given moment was the last.
I stumbled into the version of myself I had always wanted to be, but never quite saw in myself. As much as the adventuring in our group changed me, it was the solo days that allowed me to get to know myself to depths I had never allowed my consciousness to go. I spent hours on the tube alone with my headphones in, watching the people around me and observing small traits that revealed tiny details of a whole separate life being lived. I watched couples and friends, sometimes quietly and sometimes excitedly joining in, amidst hurried conversation through the metallic screaming of the Northern line and the windy tearing of the Piccadilly line.
Suddenly, anywhere I once went with the company of others I could just as well enjoy alone. I work on my laptop at the pub on the corner of 3-7 Queen’s Gate Terrace, approached by foreigners for my recognizably American blonde hair. I stare at The Execution of Lady Jane Grey by Paul Delaroche in the National Gallery and Ophelia by John Everett Millais in the Tate Britain, two paintings I had dreamed of witnessing for years, finally before me in the quiet solitude of my thoughts. I watch rereleases at a vintage cinema with a student discount and a physical ticket like those of the 80s. I walk across the Tower Bridge, looking out into the River Thames and remembering all those years ago when I was only thirteen, my only previous experience with London, feeling in my heart this was a place I would one day call my home. And I run through the light drizzle of rain late at night in Hyde Park, on Facetime with my friends from home, feeling not so far away with the lit-up London Eye as my beacon of fortitude in the distance.
The During
“This is falling for you and you are worlds away.”
And as I fall in love with London, I soon begin to fall in love in London. There are moments too delicate and too precious to encapsulate in words, in a very similar yet different way than the manner in which my friends made me fall in love with the city.
It is hard to fall, not knowing what was happening to you until it is all over. One day you wake up and the person with whom you have been going out on dates, walking through parks, taking late-night train rides, and talking about anything and everything starts to become someone more. There is no true future once your lives are to once again become separated by different countries, and even so, you realize this may be a person you will miss for the rest of your life.
Somehow, in the whirlwind, time proves to be even more precious. Things that once appeared so new and unfamiliar become known, and I somehow find them even closer and more cemented in my heart. In my mind, I can still trace the exact path from our flat at Metrogate House to the closest tube station, Gloucester Arms, which I frequented many times a day. I can see the walk to every corner of Hyde Park, Marylebone, Kensington, and Oxford Street. I can taste the candy floss and purple rain pitchers at Wetherspoons, hear the voices of my friends as we sing to Oasis at Waxy’s Irish Pub, see my flatmate in the dusk as we talk into the night across from each other in our tiny cots on top of our brick-like mattresses, and feel his hand in mine as we stand among the crowded tube, either thumb-wrestling or holding on in quiet intimacy.
The Ending
“A moment of warm sun, but I’m not the one.”
I remember him mentioning to me how strange it was for him, having never been to America, in the moments he remembered I had a whole other life at home, completely separate from my life with him there. A life completely separate from my life with my friends and flatmates abroad, whom I had only met months before, yet I felt as though I would never again know any other friends closer. I tell him in the quiet hum of a train ride home from our jobs how I am afraid to go back, afraid for all of this change and freedom to be suddenly hanging in the air, just out of reach as I return to the life I had previously known, never to be in the exact place with these exact people again.
And now after our final days together, it is the morning of May 3rd, and he carries my three massive suitcases into Terminal 2 of Heathrow airport in the departure section, as the bright sunny day burns through. I remember the embrace that seemed to stop time, the final words and looks exchanged I burn into memory, and his figure getting smaller and smaller as he ran back out to his car and I turned away.
The Epilogue
“And I’m just getting color back into my face.”
Sometimes, on my quiet walks home late at night on my college campus, I look up into the stars and picture the stars looking back down at me, imagining him looking up at the very same stars, and wonder what the stars think of us parting ways on opposite sides of the world.
At least once a day, I feel that familiar pang in my heart for the life I would have loved to continue, sometimes dulled with repetition and sometimes as sharp as the very first time. But there is good in the impermanence. It makes every experience all the more magical. All the more unforgettable. And now, I know where and what I want my life to pan out to. I know my values, my adventurous ambitions, and I know the extent of steady happiness and fulfillment of which my heart and mind is capable.
I want to make it back to London, no matter if in a year or five years, because I know I cannot let myself not go back. But the reason cannot be the lost fantasy of nostalgia. Nostalgia is poison to a young woman of ambition such as myself. If I go back, it must be because I have let go of past experiences. London can come back into my life to be redefined entirely, with new adventures and new people (and maybe some of the past, who knows).
My friends and I still see each other, not as often as we did living on the same floor in a flat would allow, but often enough to form new memories. And even so, we are still reminiscing, still carrying a bond that will never be broken even as the geography and situation change. And as for the falling in love halted in the stark separation, perhaps when I make it back to London I will get a cup of coffee with him, and in that I will not see the years past but instead the mutual experience of our unexpected crossover in life, hopefully changing our perceptions of this very large world we are subject to for the better.
Until then, as I walk through life and live through moments where the past, present and future seem to coexist as one, I will meet them all again. I will meet the person who I was there in the moments I feel ambition and make major changes to my life, never satisfied with staying still and always searching for more as I construct an extraordinary life for myself.
I will meet the strangers I swiftly crossed paths with in every new face I continue to meet, valuing the ability of a quick interaction to unlock a short yet deep connection in the most human way possible. I will meet my friends in the memories I stumble across and the thousands of pictures forever encasing our shared moments and keeping them eternal, the random laughs as I remember late nights out and talking to everyone, and the plane rides as I embark to new journeys and new countries where I once experienced 4 a.m. travel times in five-inch boots and budget-packed backpacks.
I will meet him in the romance I continue to search for, all because of the one who turned me from accepting love in the way I thought I deserved into knowing that love is actually what I always dreamed of it being. And I will meet London in everyone and everything I love, emboldened by a city’s Midas touch that turned my life into gold.
Time as it now exists will always be the epilogue to London, but there are new stories to be written and new adventures to be had. Life would not hold meaning if it were to last forever. And now these moments only live in my memory, on an endless loop where we are forever young on the upper level of a red double decker bus on our way to O’Neill’s with the city lights blurring past the rained-soaked windows.