Last night I dreamed I returned to the United Kingdom. I always meant to go back there, to live there for a time once more as I did when I was at University. The last time I visited, I took my then fourteen year old daughter. We enjoyed such an adventure. There was no plan. We traipsed around England, mostly staying in London, exploring freely. London had changed a bit since my school days, but not so much as to lose that ambience of long endurance and that incredible air of fable. Time still seemed in long supply, and I believed I would return again. I did not factor in the world going quite so utterly mad.
I dreamed of a withered and dying United Kingdom, a divided and broken land, its culture and people utterly vanquished. South Kensington, the place I had lived as a student, was lined with crucified bodies, heads on spikes. Masked men wearing black robes patrolled the streets, heavily armed. In my dream, they turned to carrion birds to feed on the ashes of the land they conquered. It was horrifying. Perhaps, a symptom of watching entirely too much Game of Thrones.
I woke up weeping for its demise more than I think I would for my own country. I rolled out of bed in the night’s darkest hours before dawn and immediately took to my computer to seek plane reservations that I might return there before my visions could come to fruition. All of this, thinking I was awake as I woke to a bright morning to find my reservations well in place. I packed and gathered my passport and arrived in London. No, I had not awaken from my nightmare. The UK was still there, but it felt dead, like a movie set more than the real place. I told myself it was the hour of the day, and entered the tube station at Piccadilly Circus.
People packed into the platform and that gave me comfort. Here they all were, citizens of London, waiting for their train. The train came and true to nature, the people queued up to enter as a mechanized and polite voice reminded them.
“Mind the gap.”
No one did. BY the time I boarded the train, all of those people disappeared into the gap which for me was a simple step and for them, an unscalable chasm. Then I awoke to my life once more, and I wrote this blog post. Let this only be a nightmare. Please, world, mind the gap.
In 10 days from the writing of this, I will move to another place, closing the door on decades of my life and starting something new. Today, I packed up my attic, separating trash from treasure and skipped rocks through the story of my life.
I found loads of pictures, thousands of pages of writing going back as early as 1981, material for hundreds of books I won’t live long enough to publish. I found music and memory in old journals. I found an old flask among my daughter’s high school things that still had liquor in it. That made me laugh. I kept the flask. She looked so innocent back then. You’d never think it, huh?
There were all my daughter’s beanie babies. At her birthdays from about the 4th birthday to maybe the 8th birthday, we used to hide all the beanie babies as a bit of a treasure hunt and the children would trade them in for prizes. I couldn’t manage to let go of those either.
I can see myself it’s a golden sunrise
And all the towns that you walk through
So you settle down and the children come
And all the trips you know you missed
So every chance you take don’t mean a thing.
Couched in your attempted rhymes
For all that they do.
Because she shared my life.
Yes, there are tons of songs about Good-bye. This post is not about a song. However, if you want to put my departure to music, have at it. Maybe next year I will continue this theme, but this year, I must bid adieu to this challenge.
I cannot, will not tell the story behind why this song shakes me so hard. It’s too personal. I did think Buffy the Vampire Slayer television series made lovely use of the song and wished that the reality of letting go of someone you really love was so easy.
In 1981, I was still looking at that bright edge of seventeen, aching to vanquish fifteen, hoping for more freedom at sixteen, and thinking at seventeen, no one would treat me like a kid anymore. So funny how your perception of time and age change over the years. This song seemed to ache and yearn in all the ways I did at the time.