MU London Studies Update

December, 2004
Megan Crain

Return

I have to go back before it gets too cold, I have to go back before I leave London. How strange to be “going back” to a place that still seems so new. The first thing that is different about this trip is what I am bringing with me. Before, it had been a chocolate candy bar, drinks to share with friends, a Discman and a water bottle, a camera, a diary, an extra shirt to lay on.

Today, it is a tube of uncooked cookie dough and milk--a comfort food goodbye. As I sneak through the bathroom designated for boys and open the window, I start to get excited for my little rendezvous. I put my food down on the ledge, hike my leg up on to the heater and crawl out of the paint chipped frame. Standing on the old fire escape bars, I look down into the rubbish below. I grab my containers and defiantly tiptoe around broken glass pieces with rough bare feet. The same pieces have been there for three months. I duck beneath the bars meant to be a limitation and make camp for myself in the middle of the platform.

As I look around me, I am reintroduced to this hideout I found the first week I came to London: The roof of my very own hostel. It’s one of the best sites in London and I don’t even have to take the tube. With its smells and sounds from the street below and its playmate buildings with their imaginative windows all packaged up into this private viewing stage, I could visit my roof every day. But I haven’t been here in a really long time. After the first couple of weeks here I found many other places to go or found places I wanted to go or perhaps just lost a bit of my energy. But now I am back for one last visit and I remember how relaxing it is. I look down my street but this time I don’t see exciting, exotic buildings that are inviting me to explore London. Now I see the bus stop I walk by every day and the bar I know is called Havanna. The street actually looks smaller and I know exactly what is around every corner--an odd contrast to the last time I was up here looking with wonder down the busy, foreign street.

It’s much colder now and I’m wearing a head warmer and a big sweatshirt. I’m eating up my cookie dough and milk and watching how fast the dark clouds are moving. This is one of the only places in London where I notice the sky. Everywhere else, I’m too busy to look up. I feel an urgency to soak everything up but it is for a different reason than the urgency I felt before. At the beginning of the semester I would come up here to think about how this semester would be and to daydream about foreign places I would visit. Now my semester is winding down and I’m thinking about how I’m going to finish my schoolwork and what it will be like to go home. As I get ready to go back inside, I take one last minute in my special quiet place. This has been one of my favorite spots in London and it’s one of the only spots that I likely won’t be seeing again. But at least I got to come back one more time before I leave London. I crawl back over the bars and over the windowsill into the warm building and say goodbye to the Macy House roof. .