Belonging

by Anna Feigenbaum

Q: What is missing?

A: All of you.

A wall of our apartment is connected to the train tracks, so the whole flat vibrates when a train passes fast enough, which makes me feel like I’m living in a low budget film. Everyone says London is rainy and gray, which it is, but they never talk about all the different shades of gray that make it beautiful. Our windows are two meters long and one and a half meters wide with windowsills big enough to sit on. The view of telephone wires, brick walls and alleyways is comforting; I think it’s the sounds of the city that make it feel so new. London has more languages spoken than any place in the world (a fact I learned from the television on the plane)—more accents, more anecdotes, all trickling in as people walk past.

I still feel like I’m going to get run over every time I try to cross the street and I’m lost without numbers or a ‘mountain’ to figure out which way is north (or north if you just tilt the map about thirty degrees). Somehow, amidst the disorientation, I feel quieter.

I don’t really know how to explain my relationship to England—which is probably why I never talked about it much in Montreal. How do you make sense of a place you are always arriving at and always leaving? A place that you never called ‘home’ even though you spent years of your life there and made enough ins and outs to fill up five pages of a passport?

I love this passage from Aimee Rowe Carrillo talking about belonging and home:

“I am writing to you from my girlfriend’s puffy red chair perched by the window, looking out over the lake as fall blows into Iowa, now my “home.” Except when I refer to “home” from here, I mean California. But when I refer to “home” from there, I mean right here. I belong in these places. I belong to and with people here and there. And I long for each in its absence, and neither is complete without the other… I am not “the same” here and there. In each I long for the other.”

I think this gets at all the rambling before I left. The fear of losing my “Montreal self.” A hodgepodge of parts that belong to this city: the midnight mountain climbs, red wine on back balconies overlooking better back balconies. Too much smoking outside benefit gigs between rows of piecemeal bikes. The potlucks of perfect vegan chocolate cake. The sound of tam-tams softly filtering in on Sunday afternoons. The realization that you don’t need any special skill to play soccer and that girls aren’t actually scary to touch.

But then there are also these London parts. Spare pieces you forgot you had stored away: riding on the top of double-decker buses, dancing to cheesy music, attempting to properly grip a pint glass. Speeding through miles of flat green countryside on the backside of trains, eating bacon sandwiches (like a good Jew), reading the Guardian over cups of bad coffee or too-sweet tea, buying produce in big bowls a pound a piece, chatting for hours about nipples and social change.

Going back and forth, you constantly shift from absence to absence. But there is also a movement from one set of habits to another. Looking out the window from that red puffy armchair—or in this case, a beige wicker one covered in fluorescent pink fleece—I feel home in this space, full of longing and belonging.