As most of you know, I did, in fact, make it home safe and sound. Picked up by my parents at the airport in Boston and then driven all the way home. Wonderful parents that they are, we stopped in Albany for dinner...at "Ye Olde English Pub." (Or something like that, anyway, it was a pub.) It had fish & chips, and steak and mushroom pie, and it was nice. I had bangers & mash and I drank the Strongbow dad ordered. (Shh)
Sunday and Monday, as if apologizing for bringing me home, the parents bought me tickets to see the filmed versions of my current favorite actor (Benedict Cumberbatch) in the play Frankenstein. Two showings because he and the other actor switched roles every night, so one performance he was the Creature and the next he was Victor Frankenstein, the creator. It was wonderful and amazing and incredible and other adjectives like that.
Later today, I am meeting up with Jules, who arrived home a few weeks before I did, and that should be nice. I'll be making the rounds sometime soon, so those of you reading this who are here, I'll be seeing you at some point!
For the moment, though, I have a cup of coffee (real coffee! The English don't understand just a plain cup of coffee and they certainly don't understand having a coffee maker in the house. But that's alright because we don't have electric kettles. I have to wait 10-15 minutes for the kettle to boil properly before I can have my tea!) and the windows are wide open and it smells like summer in the north country. Summer smells different here. It's familiar. Scent memory and all that.
I've been okay. There have been a few moments in the past couple days where I felt--uneasy. Restless. Just right now I was going through the London section on one of my websites which is chock full of picture upon picture of Parliament and the Eye and Tower Bridge and iconic pieces that make me sad. I shouldn't look through the pictures, because I know it'll make me sad and I genuinely like being home, but I'm afraid of becoming too complacent again. This happens when I'm home. I get even lazier. I waste whole days watching tv and never doing anything and I don't want to reverse all the changes that happened to me over there.
I'm different than I was when I arrived in Heathrow in January. I don't want to go back to how I was. Not that how I was was bad or anything, just--I like how I've changed. I like who I've become. I want that to continue and I want the clarity of recognizing my changes and of knowing who I am again.
I still owe you the story of Venice. I'll do that soon. And I'll still be writing here occasionally, either missing London or looking at it from a distance. When it gets farther away (and how much I hate that it will get farther away!), I'll probably do a piece on what I learned and what a wonderful experience it was, now in the context of being home and being different and seeing things in a new way.
But for now, I hope you have enjoyed my blog as I took you around the world with me. ♥
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