HIMMGF – pt 27 – Lesbians in London

Catch up on all HIMMGF posts here. [Back to part 26.]

Covid kept us apart for almost two years and the time finally came for my return to the UK.

After moving and spending weeks on end with my friend, Al, it felt natural to invite her to England with me. She and Jas got along extremely well upon their first meeting during Jas’ last visit. It really touched me to know how they considered themselves friends apart from me. I wanted to give them more opportunities to spend time together.

And frankly, I didn’t know how to be apart from the life I was living every day that year. I’d clung so closely to the major life changes I made (moving, working, filling every waking moment with those around me). I needed to take a piece of it with me.

Al and I flew out of Chicago directly to London. After security, waiting at the gate, boarding the flight, putting up our cabin bags, and finally settling in our seats, she remarked, “I can’t believe you did all this by yourself.” And I knew what she meant. It’s unbelievable to me sometimes too, even now.

I boarded my first international flight in 2016, when I was 21 years old. Before, I hadn’t flown since I was 9. I was about to meet a girl I’d been talking to on the Internet for a year. My plan: Stay with her and her family for two months and just hope everything works out.

Here I was, six and a half years later, going back to her and bringing my best friend in tow. So much of my life was divided into my time in England and my time in America. My American family; my British family. My American friends; my British friends. Bringing Al to England with me represented a convergence that I’d rarely fantasized about because it appeared so unattainable. Some semblance of merging would ignite a lot for me to think about in our coming weeks together.

Al met Jas’ parents, something I thought may never happen. Not specifically for Al, but for nearly everyone I knew over in America. She met my two best British friends, Riley and Chloe, and spent time with the Internet pals Jas and I converted into our real-life friends. She flinched at British car maneuvers as I do, laughed out loud at British words, attempted decoding the Suffolk farmers’ accents, walked cobblestone streets, and rode trains into ancient ruins.

While Jas finished her workweek, Al and I spent the first few days at Jas’ family home in Ipswich. It was a tight fit for all of us, but we were close enough to not mind. Jas took us into the Ipswich town center on day one. We stopped at many shops. Al bought a hat at H&M in cash, repeatedly trying to give the cashier exact change without knowing which coins represented which amount. After several failed attempts, she opened her palm at the register, letting the worker pick out the coins she needed. (A desperate move I recall making whilst trying to get a bus into Dublin five years ago.)

While Jas was at work for the rest of the week, I took Al to some of my favorite places in Suffolk. We took a ten-minute walk to Sainsbury’s, where a country bus stop would take us along single-laned country streets to Felixstowe’s seafront. In November, Felixstowe wasn’t the bustling beach I remembered from my visit in June, but we ate chips on a pier bench and walked the miles-long hike from the amusements’ beachfront along the coast’s corner that rounded into one of Europe’s busiest ports.

Grassy hills and dirt footpaths stretched between the amusements and the port. Sunlight danced in Al’s long, wavy hair in a moment worth recapturing. We skirted around abandoned and boarded forts along the coast and squinted at colorful shipping containers, so distant they looked like candy. We moseyed around looking for a different bus stop with routes back to Ipswich, dreading a five-mile uphill climb back to our drop-off point, with reasonable success (a nearby stop and a long wait for the bus to appear).

The next day, we took a train to the ruins at Bury St. Edmunds, remembering that nothing I’d ever experienced in the US adequately compared to the awe of seeing history like that. We climbed over the eroded frames of a church, sat in stairwells built over a thousand years ago, and ate the lunches I packed.

We took Al’s film cameras everywhere, and it really got me into using them. When she got back, the shots from these day trips especially breathed life and light into memories, and beyond that, captured my essence and gender in a way that I hadn’t been able to see reflected back in congruence with my sense of self yet. I took up shooting 35mm film for that reason. The results always felt innately queer to me.

On Friday, Al and I would take a bus into town and meet Jas at the train station, where we’d take a train to London and spend the last 10 days of Al’s time in England at an Airbnb in the country’s capital. But first, I would be so behind on packing for two (me and Jas) that I’d direct us to catch the last possible bus into town, which would be late, leading me to a panic attack on the bus that would deliver us to the train station after our train left the platform.

It’d been the first public panic attack I’d had in a long time. I clung to the suitcase I couldn’t put on the full rack at the door, sat apart from Al because the bus was packed, and tried my best not to cry (and failed). By the time we arrived at the train station, Jas had already arranged new tickets at her expense (which was a lot), and I fought back weeping over being a failure, though both women assured me that it wasn’t my fault.

The train journey and adventure ahead helped pull the doom and gloom threads from my mind as we made our way to our friend’s house. Steph lived with his parents, about a ten-minute walk from one of the Harrow tube stations, so we pulled our suitcases down the sidewalk. They skittered along, tossing off-track every few steps at uneven pavement. I recalled the story of busting my old suitcase by the Thames to Al, building up to the punchline that the suitcase was so old, only cutting through the wheel axle with a chainsaw could replace the broken wheel. (The suitcase ended up in a dumpster.)

When we got to Steph’s, we offered him some of the specially-baked pumpkin bread Al and I brought with us. (Specially baked to get baked, if you catch my drift.) We chatted the night away and giggled at everything.

The next day, we woke late and traveled to our Airbnb for the week, a private space in a flat of travelers just steps away from the Dollis Hill tube station. The room included a bathroom and shower, bed, couch, TV, washing machine and dryer combo, and a tiny kitchenette—enough for what we needed. Plus, a full kitchen upstairs accommodated all guests in the house, which made preparing dishes for a Friendsgiving hosted by Al’s London friends later in the week possible.

Al met Jacob and Bel via the Internet years ago—Jacob, an American living in London, and his wife, Bel, a Basque/Chilean writer. Excited to share the November holiday with other Americans, the three of us received invitations to the couple’s Friendsgiving meal.

We met up with Jacob and Bel before their party, spending time at the Wallace Collection, one of many free museums in London. We gaped at hundreds of paintings with equally stunning frames and displays in each room.

We walked the length of Hyde Park, cold air nipping at our toes and ears. I passed around my single pair of earmuffs between Al, Jas, and myself. And our thin gloves weren’t enough to keep fingers warm when snapping photos.

After sundown, when the cold really flourished, we ate at a Christmas and food market. I slipped down a cup of overpriced mac & cheese nearly instantly while it remained warm. After exchanging see-you-laters with Jacob and Bel, the three of us headed into our first Spoons of the trip, warming up by downing cocktail pitchers. 

The following day, we visited paintings in the National Gallery, getting a close look at what the Van Gogh collection had to offer. The Detroit Institute of the Arts has a solid Van Gogh collection to compare it to, being the first museum in the Midwest to purchase a Van Gogh painting.

That evening, we found ourselves in Camden after sunset, the market still open but with a third of its usual bustle. We popped into a piercing and tattoo parlor after the briefest moments of consideration: should we all get a noise piercing? It hurt less than I expected. We sent a picture to Al’s family group chat, whose mom replied something like, “I think people normally buy a keychain as a souvenir. But cute!”

We spent the middle day of our trip taking a train out to Cambridge. Sunshine glinted off our hair the whole day; it poured over the punting canal and the bridges cast shadows that made us shiver. Our punting guide talked at length of the creator of Winnie the Pooh. If memory recalls with accuracy, he must’ve visited Cambridge or attended school there. Or maybe they housed a collection of his books.

On Wednesday, we dressed up to enjoy afternoon tea—something we really wanted Al to experience. To this day, clotted cream is one of the British things that I ache for when I’m gone. The US has no satisfactory substitute and it sounds hard to make from scratch.

Afterward, we tubed to SoHo’s She Bar, the lesbian bar in London. The venue was tiny. We ordered our first round of drinks—I think we all solely stuck to gin that night—and nestled into the cozy backroom. Al, newly single, put a distance between us. “Okay, can you guys be all over each other tonight? I don’t want anyone to think I’m dating either of you.” We laughed together at the very lesbian situation of it—one that Al and I were used to at this point in our friendship.

To our wonderful surprise, it was karaoke night! Since we arrived early, we had a table at the very front in a room that, by the end of the night, had packed in more patrons than they had seats available. Al contributed to the warm-up crowd of performers with “Blank Space.” At the bar, another singer on the list confessed to Al she was also doing a Taylor Swift song. “A duet?” Al shot. “Um, no!” The girl deflected and returned to her seat. After the girl performed “Sparks Fly,” Al didn’t clap, and Jas and I laughed at her pout.

Before the night was over, “Valerie” gathered three performances, a girl asked for my number (and I was flattered and flustered in my “oh, I’m here with my girlfriend, thank you!” response), and we stood outside in the cold, chatting with a lesbian from Boston. (Or was it New York?) (Was it even New England?) She shared a cigarette with Al & Jas, as is customary for a drunk night out with social butterflies, apparently.

On our near-empty tube ride home, we fought fits of giggly hysteria the entire journey. Jas gave a 20-second mock-pole dance performance with the tube handrails that I wished lasted longer. We were the only ones in our car, after all.

Somewhere in the mix of all this time in London, though when exactly, I’m not sure, we stayed in most of the day, taking edibles, watching Naked Attractions, and ordering in. No longer on the seaside, we decided takeaway fish ‘n’ chips was acceptable at this point. And we went ham on Deliveroo that night. Battered fish, battered sausage, battered tofu, chips, and battered Mars bars. My only regret was that we didn’t order a Mars bar for each of us. We split two among us, thinking the fish, tofu, sausage, and chips would be too much anyway. When I tell you that I savored every last bit of my portion of our Mars bars, I mean it. Nothing out there compares to a battered and fried candy bar. Nothing.       

We spent another night at Steph’s house, where we invited a longtime Twitter friend, Rita, to join. Rita, Steph, and Jas have all hung out in my absence, but it’d been my first time seeing Rita in person. Up to that point, I’d never met someone whose in-person personality fully embodied the fangirl version put out on the Internet.

We spent much of the evening talking about how Taylor Swift is gay. (To contextualize this, Red (Taylor’s Version) just dropped, and “The Very First Night” played. No one knows about the words that we whispered. No one knows how much I miss…Yeah, you get it.)

Then the day came that we rode the Picadilly Line all the way to Heathrow so Al could catch her flight back to Chicago. She cried hugging us goodbye, which meant we all got a little teary. Watching her go, though I’d see her in six weeks, made nausea churn in my stomach, knowing that in six weeks, the future would catch up with me. And could I manage doing that with my friends and family in the US for the rest of my life? The thought of it took the air out of my lungs.

When we returned to Jas’ family home, I hated everything about it, which wasn’t atypical. Though I loved Jas greatly, I truly hated living here for any number of weeks. I hated the way there was never a clear space at the dining room table. I hated the crowded countertops. I hated the way everyone skirted around me when I wanted to cook a meal like I broke some taboo. I hated that, as much as I wanted Jas to feel like home, this place never did. And I hated that I was spending another British winter here because COVID kept me from returning in the summer air. I’d be trapped here, in this house, with her parents and 3 PM sundowns, for six more weeks.

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Read Part 28. (An Almost-Breakup.)