Westward

I wanted to do something momentous to celebrate my last night in London, though in the end the most momentous accomplishment of my departure was somehow managing to get two suitcases weighing seventy pounds each down from the third floor, through two flights of narrow staircases, to the ground floor from which they could be rolled rather than carried out the front door. This whole affair begs the question of what exactly could be filling these two suit cases, because I arrived in London last fall with the exact same weight in two other suitcases - both of which I already hauled back across the ocean at various intervals filled with goods I no longer needed in London (eg. my heavy winter clothes which I sent back from Ohio with my mother in April).

Dusty and sweaty and unreasonably exhausted from my hurried attempts to pack most of a year's worth of accumulated junk, I still managed to clean up to a presentable state and make my way down to the church of Saint Martin in the Fields. There I listened to a last concert ensconced in the pews that during the day shelter a significant portion of the neighborhood's homeless population but at night, under the glow of a couple thousand electric candles, the stone edifice shimmers with music that was meant for air inside these walls the way that the echo of burbling water over cobbled rocks was meant for quiet forest glades.

Upward from the crypt of Saint Martin, past Trafalgar Square with Nelson's column now wrapped in scaffolding for some kind of restoration project. North on Charing Cross until it turns into Tottenham Court Road. Across Bedford Square by LSHTM's outlying buildings and towards Gower Street. Turn left on Gower, just short of the cut-off to the British Museum. Northward again until the dead-end into the traffic barrier at Euston. Down into the Euston Square tube station and back up on the opposite side at North Gower. A couple short blocks from there, past the hole-in-the-wall breakfast cafes on the left and the Crown & Anchor pub on the rights. A quick left turn, up the stairs to the third floor, down the hall and on the left. Tonight I am home. Tomorrow, a final journey westward toward America.