“Coming Home”
I went to London to find love. I went to London to find adventure and life and something outside of the ordinary to jump-start my soul and send my heart wheeling skyward. Well, maybe I went to London for a class, but if life were a video game, then love, life and adventure were my side quests: Those little extras that you do to feel more complete, but don’t necessarily have to in order to beat the game.
Things started out on the bleak side. Our plane was delayed about 4 hours, taking off, finally, somewhere around the 3am range. When we arrived it was to emerge from the tube station to pouring rain and an apparently rare occasion of thunder and lightning. I guess you could say our trip started with a bang, but it’s at the risk of sounding cheesy.
It’s hard to describe how I felt those first few moments when I realized that I was really standing in London. My umbrella was in my suitcase, which meant that as the drops of rain splashed down from the sky I was soaked from top to bottom, my jeans leaving a sizable puddle on the floor in my room when I finally arrived at what would be my home for the next three weeks.
The room was cozy. My freshman year in college I had been in a single dorm room, and I had come to love that room as my sanctuary in times of trouble. This room had the same warm, inviting feel and I almost instantly felt at home. When we ventured forth again the rain had sauntered away, leaving us with a quiet, cloudy evening for getting a feel for our new neighborhood.
It was strange to me: I had never been out of the US before this trip; I had just journeyed across an entire ocean to a land on which I had never set foot before and, somehow, it felt like I was coming home. Through that entire first week I was struck by a comfort that made me feel like I was right where I belonged. Sure, the Coopers weren’t mini and the buses had two decks. There were so many things so different from the country in which I had been raised, but there were so many things that seemed exactly the same.
I knew that, as with most things in life, adventure wasn’t going to find me. I would have to set out with an initiative to find it: To take it by the tusks and shake it around before I found that great, life-altering journey. I would have to go into this city, stare fate in the eyes and dare it to have its way with me. To find life, love and adventure I would have to go out alone: By myself, with no one but my own instincts and intuition to help me.
The only problem? I sort of have this latent fear of doing things alone. It’s really less of a fear and more of a preference to do things with small groups of close friends (or one friend) so that I don’t feel completely by myself. It came to me early on, however, that if I wanted to find love, life and adventure, I would have to go out by myself. If I didn’t, I would use my friends and classmates as an excuse to hold back and not step outside my protective boundaries.
I started with the Thames.
It seemed to me the perfect place to gain insight and inspiration: To find the true meaning of life. After all, didn’t Shakespeare sit along its banks and fill pages with sonnets and plays: Works of art unique and unmatchable by any other scribe? With its silken water, faded shades of brown, there must be a muse hidden somewhere in its muddy depths. I crossed bridges, stopping occasionally to glance over the lapping wavelets or toss in a coin for good luck. I spent one sunny afternoon walking a 2-mile stretch along the south bank, breathing deep the smell of garbage that had been left on the street for collection earlier that morning.
I sat in the gardens near the giant ferris wheel known as the London Eye, staring out over the waters and contemplating. All of this I did patiently, opening myself to the experience, but only seemed to find myself more stuck than before, a feeling of stagnation settling over me. It wasn’t until the final week we were there, when I wasn’t looking at all, that I felt a small spark of something in the music of a young Slovakian guitarist/singer who played a set on the very banks I had been searching before.
I thought maybe I would find something in the bar scene. I have known many people who are people of the early morning hours, stumbling to bed after a night of boozing and dancing. I searched for love in the London nightlife, hoping to find someone sweet with a good story to tell: Someone with an accent I could at least have a decent flirt with. I ended up with a 70-year-old man professing his undying forever-love to me; a creep almost dragging me off of my bar stool, only understanding the word “no” when I threw out my arms and body-checked him away from me; and getting a kiss from an only slightly less sketchy creep who frenched me and I couldn’t help but think, “This is what it must be like to kiss a vacuum cleaner.”
I knew before London that the kind of guy I wanted to meet would not be found in a rainbow-lit room playing music so loud that even if you scream you can’t be heard over the din of pulsing beats and repetitive vocals. In retrospect I begin to wonder why I even thought to look there, but it was the desire to immerse myself in something I never do while somewhere I’ve never been. I enjoyed wandering the eerily empty streets of London at 4am more than I did dancing on a wooden floor with 100 other people sweating just as much as I was, thrown together in an orgy of grinding bodies. And I love to dance.
It was the solo saxophone slicing through the early morning silence of Piccadilly Circus, with its neon advertisement reminiscent of Times Square in New York City as beacons of an overindulgent society that made me stop and take in another small shard of some secret fire I was attempting to kindle. Something small and beautiful and real was piercing its way through the heart of a hostile corporate takeover.
I tried to find adventure in celebrity. Not my own celebrity, but in proving with my own eyes that movie stars were real people made of flesh and bone and blood and not just holograms on the big screen. This involved standing for eight hours in a rabid crowd, straining at their leashes for an autograph. This involved getting pushed and shoved and bumped around as I attempted to get merely a glance at a famous face. This involved attending the red-carpet European premiere of The Dark Knight.
To say that a movie’s celebrity premiere is a frantic experience is like saying that the sun is really bright. It takes a particular breed of person to come to these things over and over again willingly. It takes a person who cares only about him/herself and no one else. It takes a person who is willing to push and shove and scratch and bite and cheat and weasel their way the forefront against the metal barricades so that they can complain about how people need to stop leaning on them. It takes people with no heart and no real lives.
I went to the European celebrity premiere looking for adventure. What I ended up with was a rollercoaster ride of whirlwind emotions: All the feelings in the World in one convenient package. I was happy that I would soon get to see real movie stars face-to-face. There was high anticipation as the carpet rolled out and the moment drew closer. Pangs of jealousy struck as I longed to be up front where I could get good pictures and anger as I realized the true nature of some of these fan-people. There was excitement when the Batmobile drove down the red carpet, followed by fatigue as I waited another hour before the big-name celebrities showed up. I fell in love with Aaron Eckhart at first sight and wanted to cry when, just as I was about to take a picture of Michael Caine, my camera died. Awe and respect swept over me as I witnessed the unassuming grace of Maggie Gyllenhaal followed by sheer disappointment and utter defeat as, at the moment of truth, I was shoved away from seeing Christian Bale. Finally I walked away disgruntled and grumpy, ready to be home where I could sit and have a nice dinner.
I went there looking for adventure and came home with a new understanding of what I would never bring myself to do to another human being and an experience I’ll be able to carry with me for a lifetime and a day I’ll never forget.
It wasn’t enough, though. By the middle of my third week in London I was still feeling like something wasn’t quite clicking, like there was something I was still missing and I was running out of time to find it.
I searched for my inner child by visiting the London Aquarium. Something about being around giant tanks of water and watching hundreds of kinds of fish swim around makes me feel happy. It causes a sense of calm to wash over me. I looked for an adventure in Camden only to find myself too early for the night crowd, but too late for the market. It wasn’t among the designer clothes at Harrod’s or in the intricately decorated churches of the nearby area. I tried to find it in the history, something rich and abundant in London. While I found the history interesting, and even chilling at times, it didn’t seem to fire up the pilot light in my soul.
I found moments of it in the theatre, between fulfilling my inner geek by seeing Lord of the Rings: The Musical and by fulfilling my inner diva by watching a live screening of Le Nozze di Figaro with 8,000 other people, but it wasn’t enough to kick me into forward gear.
I got on the plane that final day thinking that I had come within a hand’s reach of grasping it, but somehow missed it: That one moment that would make my heart beat faster and my soul soar skyward. Between sleeping and keeping myself occupied I pondered quietly. I mused, turning every moment over in my head, wondering why my trip didn’t somehow didn’t feel complete. Hadn’t I done everything I wanted to in London? Maybe I hadn’t found life, love and adventure to their full extent, but I had gotten glimpses, enough to say that I sucked the marrow out of my trip overseas.
I was on planes and in airports all day that day, and had to walk half the length of the Detriot Airport to claim my luggage after all was said and done. My legs were sore, I ached all over from sitting for so long and I wanted nothing more than a drink of water. Then I saw my mom and dad waiting for me by the conveyor belt. I ran over and hugged them tightly and realized that it was that moment that was missing.
It was great to spend three weeks overseas learning and living and loving life and adventure, but nothing could compare to that moment of coming home and seeing the people that I love and that I knew loved me.
Adventure may take you away, sweep you off your feet and force you to hit the ground running, but it never really feels finished until that moment you come back and realize, “I’m home.”
