Last night Jacob and I watched Brooklyn, a movie I watched when I was in Cambridge years ago. I remember the painful identification of the fear and loneliness of homesickness I felt with the film the first time I watched it. This last week I've felt bouts of a similar feeling, but more generalised. I can't confine last weeks feelings only to homesickness, because while I miss people at home that's not the only thing I'm missing. And missing isn't the only feeling either.
This is harder to explain than I thought it would be - we should go back to Wednesday last week.
Wednesday was the first day I went back to Cambridge. I took a train and read Birdsong on a sunny seat and found my way easily to Sidney without looking at Google maps. Within 5 minutes there I'd met 5 people apart from Jacob that I knew. Jacob and I made lunch, and over a faux-argument about whether peas are more bean or more green we found ourselves laughing and then hugging.
And then the laughter was replaced with the intense feeling of longing met and grief found. I was surprised at how much I realised then that I'd been missing him and the conflation of joy at being with him again and sorrow at knowing we only had a few hours before I had to leave again brought sudden tears to my eyes.
When I got back to London that evening I had some trouble with my bicycle and tube regulations, which eventually left me saying a hasty 'thank you' to the tube staff and speed walking my way out of the station, trying not to break until I was standing outside the red walls of Kings Cross station and I let myself cry. It was about 10pm and there were still many people on the streets, and yet I felt like I couldn't ask anyone for help - things seem to move so fast here and people remain within their bubbles of concern. How would I get back to Fiona's, which was so far away and not the 15 minute walk to Medwards in Cambridge, and on far more dangerous streets? London felt like a ocean and I was unmoored. The contrast in familiarity, safety and friendship that I felt and Cambridge and here, and the geographical difference, was so stark and a combination of lots of the things I was feeling in terms of why London had been feeling like a hostile place.
In the days following, I developed an eye infection, discovered my bike was kaput and needed replacing, struggled to talk to people in my course/on the scholarship, and went for a lecture that didn't seem to say anything although it was 2 hours long. I felt so tired - simply doing the basic things like cooking and having a shower and getting to campus seemed to take so much effort. One evening when I called Jacob it all sort of descended on me as I looked up at the ceiling and wondered if I could actually do this year. 'This is so much harder than I thought it would be,' I told him.
But since then I've had good lectures, met really kind and welcoming people in church, found my way back home from school without getting lost, and got a new bike. (She's called Olivia, and if she were a human she's be about 65 years old, with dyed blue hair and a light, gentle voice, full of joy but also comforting) There have been moments of still feeling lost, but with every cycle up the archway hill it gets a little shorter.
On Thursday I saw waiting for Will on a bench on the top of Parliament Hill, when an old man approached me. 'May I sit?' he asked. 'Of course,' I replied.
His name was Lucello, and he told me about his varied and exciting life - his move from Milan to South Africa under the pretence that he was a bricklayer, although he'd never laid a brick in his life. 'After the first day my hands were all torn,' he said. From bricklayer, he became a carpenter, then a window dresser and stand maker, which included moving to England. He spoke for about 30 minutes, and I was happy to listen because in his presence I felt the rare feeling of slowing down, and stopping and being wholly absorbed in a life of adventure and uncertainty that wasn't my own. Knowing from hindsight that all works out in the end, in some way or another 'if you have enough cheek and enough-- enough -- ah you know what I mean?' (he said, trying to get at the sense of confidence and dauntlessness and risk that I think is best summed up in the word ballsy) was comforting, reminding me that - hey, I'm only 22, and I've only been here 2 weeks, and life with unfold itself according to God's good plan. I might not know entirely what I'm doing but I'm going to be ballsy about next week, I'm going to learn without fearing that I'm the least experienced and qualified person in the class, I'm going to talk to people without the fear of being thought odd or the fear of rejection.
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