If to seek out the pleasures and sorrows of one’s youth, as cautioned Camus, is a kind of folly certain to be punished, then punished I will be.
A man returning, reverting to a boy to heal old wounds, in search of greener time. Slow, fractured, fragrant these memories return. Retreading old grounds is a sort of rediscovery of the lovely things that now make us whole, but also of leaps unmade, chances untaken, and the love undeclared.
Winter in London drizzles with melancholy.
I arrived late in the evening and was greeted by a sombre air gripping the city so tightly, that should one reach into the night and squeeze, wet would drip like from a cold, damp towel. Navigating transit had the sort of awkward, unceremonious ease of getting back on a bicycle after a lifetime. I traversed the terminals in a jet-lagged fugue, past narrow halls where even the cracks on tiled walls are timeless, and found my way to the Underground. The tube car stuttered and sputtered, network signal restored by the intermittent spells of night crashing down.
Was it the jetlag that brought on this sense of disorientation, or the sudden disconnection from the mobile network? I had grown accustomed to the manufactured sense of connection afforded by Shanghai’s pervasive mobile network, a connection with the world’s information that belied the disconnection I could disguise no longer in this strange wasteland I once called home.
A cackle of swans waded into the carriage and seized the centre pole, teasing glances at a guy in chiselled beard, giggles teetering between them. Swans in polished shoes, fashioned smiles and plastic faces.
*
I was staying at Gina’s place. She purchased it this year, a small, semi-attached house tucked in the middle of a quaint and quiet street lined by columns of homes just like it, three storeys stacked on top of each other, stitched together by narrow stairs on the side that creaked and groaned to protest my presence. The basement floor was leased to a lovely couple who kept the keys. Elias was a junior lawyer. Louise worked for a local politician. They’d just gotten engaged at 26 and when they looked at each other the room glowed with anticipation of a life to come.
The kitchen opened onto a set of iron stairs that led into a backyard Gina shared with them. A landscape artist named Millie had been working on it. Come next year, irises and lilies and other plant-ish things with Latin names would bloom. A lovely house for a brutish guest.
Gina and I met a decade ago at LSE, where she worked as a career counsellor while I was an undergraduate. I walked into her office one day, my anxiety spilt onto her floor, and we became friends. She introduced me to my first job. We stayed in touch, occasionally meeting for coffee at that fancy cafe below the Wellcome Trust, where she would lend a sympathetic ear to my storied twenties. Sometimes her children Gus and Imi would join us. I envied their wholesomeness. There is no better reflection of one’s character than the spirit of their children, and hers were filled with a kind of grounded self-assurance. Those were the times when I wished I was a decade younger, as we figurative orphans are wont to do.
It was an odd thought: the realisation that one was suddenly old enough to date his relationship in decades.
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