I Started to Feel Things Again.
If I had been drinking, I would have missed England. Instead, I was fully present.
We shopped and strolled the streets of London and saw a handful of punk rockers who, with their rock-hard hair and nose rings, were so cool it made my stomach flip.
We actually rode on a double decker bus.
We visited church after church after church where the ceilings were so high, looking up felt like studying a decorated sky. We saw Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey, where I marveled at the names: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Bronte, Dickens – and my favorite, Dylan Thomas, who drank himself to death in his thirties. (I liked him because he was Bob Dylan’s namesake; I didn’t know he was a drunk and I am no poetry scholar.)
We went to restaurants where they served us the world’s greatest fish and chips wrapped in newspaper, grease dripping as we carried it outside. We ate a dozen different kinds of potato chips from the market and called them “crisps” as we tried to perfect the elusive English accent. We went to a place where I ordered something called “prawns” which the server said was “shrimp” but the little dead things came with their heads on, and I could not eat them in spite of the prawns’ ultimate sacrifice.
We rode the London Underground, which had nothing to do with slavery like I’d originally thought. My dad read the maps and we all stood behind him, waiting for him to figure out which train we were supposed to ride to get to where we wanted to go. Sometimes we had to hop off at the next stop and go the other direction, but we actually laughed when this happened.
I laughed with my family.
We toured Oxford where I stood awestruck in the library and never wanted to leave. We toured Cambridge and The Open University, where we saw my dad’s personal parking spot near his Open University office. We saw the heart-wrenchingly beautiful Les Miserables at the Palace Theatre, where I wept aloud.
As I started to feel things again, I felt proud of my dad for getting the Fulbright. I started to like my family again; I felt close to my sisters. We quipped and shared inside jokes.
I started to feel interested in the things around me; the grayness lifted and I could see some light. I felt lighter, happier, more comfortable in my own skin. I wasn’t healthy by any stretch, but I was getting better.
I could feel it. Every day, I could feel it. I felt better.
And then, at the end of three weeks, it was time for me – just me – to go home: sober, clear-headed, brain fog lifted for the first time since high school. I was finally able to be myself, free from the chains that had shackled me for so long.
But I knew what was coming: I was going back to Larry, to biker life, to Pitcairn.
I did not want to go.
So I dragged out my departure. Before arriving at the airport, I forced my long-suffering father to take me to the London Harley-Davidson shop so I could buy myself a Harley-Davidson t-shirt, transitioning my brain by buying a British t-shirt from a distinctly American motorcycle store. I was more than a little insistent that we buy that shirt, in spite of the distinct threat that I might miss my plane.
No one was happy with my behavior, but somehow we made it to Heathrow on time.
I waved goodbye to my family, and headed back to the States.
