I had a dream about London this morning. The kind of dream where you realize you’re dreaming but don’t want to wake up, so you fight to continue with both your subconscious and conscious until you reach the point you were hoping to find. In this dream, I was traveling in London with my parents, sister, brother-in-law, and their dog, Wally (and no, in real life Wally would never be meant for international travel). At one point in this dream, in the taxi on the way to the airport, my father asked me why I was sad, and I said, “London is the love of my life. I don’t know why, but it is. I love it, and it’s breaking my heart to leave again.”
And I woke up to the sound of rain falling, a noise I have always (happily) associated with my favorite city.
I studied abroad in London for five months my junior year in college. I attended classes at Kings’ College London on the Strand and lived off the Borough Tube Stop, southwest of the Globe Theatre. There’s been a lot of competition, but I still think those five months were the happiest of my life. My dream self wasn’t lying; London is the love of my life. I realize how weird that sounds, so I wanted to explore the idea.
I have always been an Anglophile. Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights are two of my absolutely favorite novels EVER, and I often find myself still clinging to English authors for my pleasure reading, like Zadie Smith, Sarah Waters, Michael Ondaatjie, Iris Murdoch, and so on. I can, given a few minutes to recall, diagram the geneaology of the British kings from Richard II to George I. My dream man has always been a cross between Ralph Fiennes and Colin Firth. All my life I had dreamed of going to London. I knew, somehow, that I would love it. And when I got the opportunity in college, I felt the oddest way: excited, thrilled, and, somehow, CERTAIN that this was going to be amazing.
It was. I mean, on my first full day there, I looked the wrong way, stepped into traffic, and was almost hit by a truck. Seriously. It was a matter of inches. But after that small little snafu, it was amazing. One of my favorite things to do is to put on a pair of headphones, pull up my music mood, and walk in a city. This sprung from my time in London. I’d walk from the Strand to my flat, or from Waterloo to Trafalger Square, or from Oxford Street to the Kings’ College Library, which was in an old church and is maybe the closest structure to my nerdy little booklover’s heaven that I’ve ever seen. I could go for miles, loving the feel of slipping through the crowds like a wily little fish leaping up stream, looking up every few steps to appreciate the lovely three-hundred-years-old stone building standing among the modern offices like it was nothing to be so beautiful and aged and still THERE despite the wars, and stopping every now again to gaze out on the River, with the undulating water and graceful bridges twining across it like branches across the sky, and snap a picture and think I had never seen a view that moved me more. I would spend hours in the 7 story Waterstones book seller, pick out my 2 for 3 special books, hand over a 2 pound coin, marveling again at the weight and color of it, at Starbucks (yes, I went to Starbucks, because back then it was the only coffee shop where patrons were not allowed to smoke), and head with my supplies to Green Park, and sit and read in those mercurial moments of sunshine. And if I had to go to the bathroom, I’d stop in the free National Gallery and spend a moment in the Impressionist wing. Even having to empty my relentless bladder could be part of the magic! I loved my classes, I was able to travel in Europe on the weekends with my friends, and every day I got to walk out into the world of London, with its bustle and flow and endless possibilities. Those five months were one of those rare times when all the factors worked out the way they were supposed to, where all the gears of the daily grind of life fell into place with a smooth little click, and I loved them.
So that is the reason I love London. But there are deeper things going on, things that make the experience and the city loom so large in my psyche that the sound of rain summons me to dream about them a good four years after I last set foot in the United Kingdom. For one thing, I have never been in a relationship where I was in love with him and he was in love with me. None of my relationships have ever gotten that far. I say I am in love with London, but not even I am hippy-dippy enough to suppose London was in love with me. I was allowed to go there, I was allowed to stay and explore and find my happiness, and in the story of my life, where the overwhelming romantic motif is of me wanting to be with people who haven’t wanted to be with me (or vice versa, although that’s much more rare), that was enough to earn my devotion—even though London didn’t have to do anything but to exist. Even more tellingly, I had fantasized about London for years. My fervent little stupid imagination had built up London, had made it be the place I should be for so many years, and raised my hopes so high, and London—and the experience of living there—lived up to my expectations. This dreaming has been a downfall in my romantic life, where as Dodie Smith writes in I Capture the Castle , I should never think of how something will happen because that will guarantee it will never happen at all. But London—being in London—was somewhere where what I thought would happen actually did. No surprise I hold it so dear in the heart my brain so often leads to disappointment.
I can admit that I romanticize the experience; I was only there five months, and clearly the honeymoon never had time to end. Obviously there were things that weren’t so “perfect.” It was expensive and crowded and polluted. Everyone is in a hurry, everyone is very absorbed in themselves and in what they are doing. You can’t buy good old regular chocolate chips in your average Tesco, and Chik-fil-As are nowhere to be seen. All of these are very serious flaws ☺ Even though I always flirt with the idea of moving back, I know I wouldn’t want to live there forever. I love the idea of babies with cute little English accents, but the idea of pushing my clean little infant though the loaded streets of Central London makes me shudder for her lungs. I know that I would get tired of paying so much, and rushing every time I stepped out the door, and I know that the time would come when I wanted to leave, even if just to go out to the suburbs. But I find it hard to believe I would ever stop loving London.
Being there felt right. Being me, exactly as I was, felt right when I was me in London, and that’s not an experience I have had too often. It sounds ridiculous, but when it comes to love, I am waiting for the time when I feel like I felt in London—when it feels right. I have thought I have felt that a few times, and every time it has come to nothing, so London is allowed to retain its title.
And I can’t wait to go back.
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