“The things you want are always possible; it is just that the way to get them is not always apparent. The only real obstacle in your path to a fulfilling life is you, and that can be a considerable obstacle because you carry the baggage of insecurities and past experience.”-Les Brown

Dear Ether,

I’m going to be leaving for London in a few weeks and I’m really daunted by the journey.  You won’t know this, but I’ve spent the past 7 years living on and off in Blighty and have moved back to Los Angeles (the city that I was born and raised in.)   Throughout my posts you will learn of my adventures and misadventures in London—and boy—there were many (who knew when the rapid beeping started occurring on the Heathrow Express and your expensive Samsonite luggage was caught in its doors that they wouldn’t retract?  That your handle would snap off taking your suitcase with it? Yes—to my humiliation the train was halted and I did retrieve my bag but I might as well have had tattooed across my forehead “tourist”—I still have that damned piece of luggage and schlep it everywhere—minus the handle, of course). 

My partner (who I shall refer to as my “English gent”) decided that before he went through the rigmarole that is getting US working papers, he wanted to go back home and see his parents (once you submit documents they detain you in the States for 6 months and he’s already been here 3, so he’s really itching for fish n’ chips I reckon, but he “claims” he wants to see the folks).  Anyway, this trip is all happening last minute and I didn’t expect to be going back to England so soon.  I haven’t been to London since December, and I’m starting to regret ever leaving.  The truth is, I don’t seem to be happy anywhere I’ve lived (Los Angeles, Connecticut, New York and London) and I guess my description of broken luggage earlier really describes ME.  They usually say it isn’t the place…..but the baggage you bring with it……and I’m still carrying around a beaten up piece with a snapped off handle….c’mon English majors….Psych majors…..you know what I’m getting at. 

I know what’s going to happen.  I’ll get off the plane, fall back in love with Londinium and my heart will break a week later when I return to Los Angeles—a suburban city with no street-beat and (this is hugely embarrassing to admit, Ether) where I live with my parents in the room I grew up in—the room where, when I was a little girl and had the world to look forward to, I dreamed of being somebody—and where I’m definitely NOT feeling like ANYBODY.  

I suppose I never thought I would fly back so soon.  I also thought I would acclimate to Los Angeles and not feel any concern of visiting London for the fear of RETURNING back to the Golden State.  I’ve left so many memories in London.  My little flat in Hampstead/Golders Green with its dangerous fire-escape steps (forget wearing heels walking up or down that lawsuit made of metal), the South Bank with its endless people-watching and dirty lull of the River Thames, my favorite greasy spoon that made the best chips (though you did get the impression it was the type of place that scraped what you didn’t eat back onto another plate ready to be served to an unsuspecting customer).  I just miss London’s weird and wonderful quirks.  I know some asshole will slam into me in Waterloo station (once some girl checked me so badly with her painfully fake oversized “Birkin” that I was sore for days), and I will play elbow war with a Chav on the Tube, but dammit, at least I was out and living.  These days I’m holed up in my car. I never get to show off my outfits (I’ll take pictures throughout my posts—I’m a clothes whore and frankly, quite a good one) because I’m never walking and talking to folks on the street, and people in Los Angeles are just so straight-edged compared to the bonkers people you meet in the land of the Union Jack. 

But for all of the memories left behind in London, I also have many ghosts.  They haunt me wherever I go.  The jobs that I got fired from.  The friends that I lost from bitter misunderstandings.  The cold winter nights that I walked alone without a friend to call, and my family 6,000 miles away.  But one particularly irksome ghost that’s waiting for me is my freedom.  I will no longer enter London the way I left it.  When I left London I was dating my “English gent.” We’re now married and I find it stifling.  It’s another thing I’m not adjusting well to (extremely complicated and will be covered in another post).  I had a great job, was making excellent money and felt I could do or buy anything—this is no longer.  I could call my parents at my leisure, and more enjoyably, hang up on them at my leisure.  This too, is no longer.  I felt like I was another me when I was in London.  A girl on an adventure.  Part of a fantasy.  That every day was a new tale and that everything I did and experienced would be a chapter in some unwritten novel.  I felt like I was on some secret reality show and I was the star.  Now, I’m in my VERY real world in Los Angeles—no longer an ex-pat living an enviable life, but a wallflower in an expansive field of perennials.  My freedom was what I had coveted and it only took losing it to appreciate how much I valued it.  I never factored that in when I decided to move back to Los Angeles for “practical reasons” (again, another complicated tale—bear with me Ether, you will learn all).  Practicality was a grave error—and I don’t handle mistakes well.  Regardless, for one week I will have my freedom back—but unfortunately, I’ll have a return ticket home to claustrophobia. 

I guess we all want to be unique, special.  For some, that is simpler than for others.  For you, all it might take to be special is to be loved by your family.  For others, to be loved by the stage.  For me, it was always to be extraordinary—to stand out.  Don’t judge me and think I am a self-centered diva.  I’m not.  I’m only being honest with you, Ether.  I just always thought I was destined to be so much more than you’re average Joe.  So for me to be so very ordinary right now, pains me.  

For a single week, my accent will draw people to talk to me.  They will ask me questions and engage me.  I will have a ballsier persona in London.  I will walk with a different swagger.  I will don a vintage skirt, sandals, tie my hair with a ribbon and go walking in the countryside and pretend that I’m a character from a Somerset Maugham novel.  I will escape and dream.  But these vivid dreams come with a price.  I will have to come back home and fade into the colorless landscape that is my life right now. 

I am a Londoner in so many more ways that I am a Los Angelino.  I haven’t lived in L.A. since I was 18.  My soul is in that city.  I think it remains there still.  To revisit one’s soul and to have it re-enter the body when one’s body has felt its void will be exhilarating.  But, this time I will actually know the date I will feel loss and pain again because it will be the date of my return ticket.  It’s the day I let my soul leave my body again. 

I hope, one day soon, that my luggage will be mended.  But, truthfully, I never want it to be 100% put back together.  What makes me who I am is that snapped off handle.  I know people would think this strange.  That it’s odd for one to want to be slightly broken if it means that it sets them apart. Why would I choose to be slightly damaged if I could be fully fixed?  Why?  Because sometimes beaten up luggage reminds you of journeys you took that taught you a thing or two.  That made your soul wiser even if it also bruised it a bit.  And, that might have even left ghosts in the places you visited and a whisper of your soul, too.

I always used to ask people to say my name once when they went on vacation somewhere exotic because I truly believed that a part of me would remain through their thoughts.  That I would be there too—even just for a second. To imagine my name might have been said on the clear shores of the Aegean, or the hot sands of Egypt made me feel that I had traveled somewhere amazing in spirit.  This comforted me, because if I never see the Pyramids and I never visit Crete, at least in name or in some strange fiber, I’ll have been there.

So, when I pack that bag in the next few weeks, with its missing parts and beaten up canvas, I will smile.  That for 30 seconds, on September 19^th, 2001, I made a train stand still and my luggage, containing my few possessions, stood awkwardly in limbo, snapped between the teeth of two doors of the Heathrow Express, and all I had in my hand was a broken handle and the beginning of a glittering adventure and my dream of freedom.

Dedicatedly yours,

—One of 365