A Legal Alien

I’ve mostly gotten over thinking of Britain as a country where cars driven by passengers careen down the wrong side of the road intent on my destruction. I no longer look the wrong way when crossing the street (though some instinct still tries feebly to warn me I’m about to be flattened by a taxi rocketing up the A3 in the lane it’s not going to be in). I no longer anxiously consult the painted words at the intersections advising me to LOOK RIGHT (this cuts down dramatically on the number of dead tourists per annum). Of course I’m probably dooming myself to being run over by a Metro bus as soon as I get back to Seattle.

I’d be surprised if I ever came to think of this place as ordinary, exactly; the architecture alone is a constant reminder you’re not in Kansas anymore, and your ear is always bending itself around the remarkable range of accents that can be packed into a place smaller than California. No, I’m still a long way from home, but I feel less like a tourist every day, and when I look out my window, what I see seems somehow right.

I was thinking about it the other day: why I came here; why I went anywhere, really, when I liked it so well where I was, and why here. I can see that I needed a shift in my thinking, and that was going to be harder to come by in familiar surroundings. My life needed some sort of shakeup, and while we don’t usually need to go looking for those, I think maybe it doesn’t hurt to. It’s taken me a lot of years (and I mean a lot) to begin to work out who I am and where I fit into the larger picture. Removing myself from the far more comforting environment of Seattle and my family was perhaps a way to accelerate the process. I said I wanted an adventure, but what is an adventure if not a chance to meet yourself all over again in unfamiliar surroundings? Whether you’re being chased by headhunters in South America or attending the ballet in Moscow, you’re likely to experience self-discovery that might have passed you by at home on the sofa in front of this week’s Battlestar Galactica.

But wait, now, I don’t want my surroundings to be all that unfamiliar. I’m sure I could live better cheaper in Czechoslovakia, but I doubt I’d have mastered buying groceries by now, much less chatting with the plumber about my broken hot tap, although it’s possible cars there drive on the proper side of the road… No, I wanted to be in London, a city I already loved and knew a bit, where people almost speak my language, and even the most common things are not quite… common. Here every walk down the street makes me think about where I am, and having placed myself in an environment both comfortingly known and edgily unusual, I feel more aware of myself and my perceptions than ever before.

I have to admit I’m somewhat isolated and lonely; greetings from the convenience store owner and the odd hello to the bartender on my way out and in don’t take the place of having friends. But I’ve never minded time spent alone or needed constant entertainment from others, and it’s all part of the adventure, isn’t it? Besides, if ever I get to feeling blue – and I don’t all that often – I can get up and walk over to my window and be reassured that I’ve come to pretty good place.