A little less broken, p.10
A Little Less Broken, page 10
* * *
EVERYTHING WAS DIFFERENT. YOU know that saying, “No matter where you go, there you are?” I call bullshit.
In London, I went to every gallery, theater production, tourist attraction, castle, village, forest, and historically significant park bench. I stopped to read every blue plaque on every house and could spot those markers of notable former residents from blocks away. I walked forty-five minutes to my new school instead of taking the tube so I could soak it all in. What was it about this place?
It could have been the people. The women in my program—Rachel, Lauren, and Aly—weren’t like the girls I knew in college or Greenwich or Spain. For one thing, they were mine, not Ami’s or Chelsea’s. I was an included, valuable member of the group, not a friend of a friend who awkwardly tagged along.
Aly had a lifelong dream of becoming a librarian, Rachel cared about politics more than anyone I’d ever met, and Lauren was quiet 99 percent of the time, and pure chaos the other 1 percent. She was my adventure buddy, always ready to find the local Hare Krishna monk serving free vegan food outside the University of London. The four of us visited the occasional quiet pub to chat or took a £1 Megabus to various estates around the country. They cared about the things I cared about. When the popular kids got rowdy in the hall kitchen keeping everyone else awake, Rachel was the one to storm in to shut them up before I even had to get out of bed. Halfway across the world, I had found my people.
It could have been the classes. I was reminded that I loved learning when I cared about the material, and I would have been obsessed with every class at my new school regardless of a grade. In one called British Youth Culture, we sat around a long table and nodded thoughtfully while listening to the Cure. British Women Novelists was hosted on the top floor of a creaky old bookstore that smelled like vanilla and damp wood. The History of London was mostly walking tours around a city I traversed by foot anyway.
It could have been London herself. I’d walk through the City of London and look at a thousand-year-old wall and feel like time didn’t exist. On free afternoons I took the tube to St. Paul’s, where there was this quaint tea shop overlooking the cathedral, just to get a slice of cake and look out the window at the familiar dome that had watched over Londoners for centuries.
Though, let’s be honest, it was probably Lewis.
We met on the floor of a hostel in Oslo, Norway. Lauren and I had found a last-minute flight deal for forty pounds, round trip. What was in Oslo? What would we do there for three days? Couldn’t tell you then or now, but we were broke and adventurous so we shrugged and booked the tickets.
A few days later, we sat on the grimy hallway floor outside the room we were sharing with twenty other broke and adventurous students, when a couple about our age walked past and must have heard us yell-talking.
“Americans!” said the girl with a strong English accent and gummy smile.
“Ha ha, yeah,” I said. Unsure whether this was an insult, I gave a half-hearted what-can-you-do shrug.
I glanced at the boy. He was a few years older than me, and he smiled with his mouth open, showing a cute gap between his front teeth. His eyes were the blue a child would use in a coloring-book image of a prince, startling even behind his narrow glasses. His face was rough with a day or two of dark scruff that I suspected was permanent, and he wore, on this frigid Norwegian night, a slim brown coat and a messenger bag slung across his chest.
“Hi,” he said. I couldn’t place his accent.
They joined us on the floor, our four backs pressed against the concrete wall, and within minutes I had fallen in love with this shy boy. Turned out he was a Kiwi, and I kept asking him to say words so I could compare our pronunciation. At twenty, I knew nothing about New Zealand, so I flung questions at him like grenades.
“Is it sunny year-round?”
“No, we have four seasons, sometimes all in one day, but it’s lovely in the summer.”
“You look pretty tan actually,” I said, eyeing him up and down like a little pervert.
“My hands may be tan but the rist of me is white.” He pulled the sleeve of his coat up an inch to show me the pale skin on his forearm.
“Your wrist?”
“The riiiist,” he said slower, gesturing broadly to himself.
“Oh, the rest!” I laughed. Then blushed furiously as I imagined the rest of him. Oh boy, was I in trouble.
Something about his quiet yet polite demeanor made me turn up the dial of my own deeply hidden charm. I wanted to show off who I had become here: cute, fun, and up for anything. With barely a day’s notice I’d flown to a country I knew nothing about—look at how interesting and spontaneous I am!
For hours we sat talking about nothing and everything. His companion, Jane, wasn’t his girlfriend but a friendly coworker, and she and Lauren sat rolling their eyes at each other while I threw myself at Lewis like a fly against a window. I learned that not only did Lewis and Jane also live in London, but their office was on the same block as my internship at the Royal Academy of Arts.
“Sweet as!” Lewis said when I told him.
“Sweet … ass?” I asked. Was he making a pass at me? Ohthankgod.
“No!” He turned red. “Sweet AS. As in … as.”
“What the hell does that mean?”
“Oh—um. Everything! Thank you. You’re welcome. No worries. That’s great. It’s kind of a catchall.”
“Well then, sweet ass!” I said, laughing. We exchanged info and promised to meet up once we returned to England.
“I’m obsessed with him,” I said to Lauren, after they’d left.
She laughed. “I can see that.”
“He’s so easy to talk to. And cute.” I sighed dramatically. “I must seduce him.”
“Well, ask him out when we get home.”
“I will!”
When Lauren and I arrived back in London, I hopped straight on Facebook to search for Lewis. There he was, smiling into the sun, a snow-covered mountain in the background. He was even cuter than I remembered. I added him as a friend and sent a super subtle, not-at-all obvious message …
1. i am happy to report that you are the only lewis john-sullivan in existence (actually, on facebook, but whatever—same thing)
2. your picture makes me want to be your best friend
3. lauren and i have been saying a) “sweet as” at every possible opportunity, and b) your name over and over again trying to get her to say it right.
4. i like lists.
Oh my god, flirting in your twenties. What a time to be alive.
At least it worked, because suddenly we were meeting up weekly during our lunch breaks to walk around Green Park, messaging each other links to Flight of the Conchords videos, and standing slightly too close on tube rides to various trendy pubs while I wondered what it would be like to kiss him. After a month of friendly-but-flirty hangouts, I still had no idea if he was interested in me. The more ambivalent he acted, the more I pushed, performing the role of an over-the-top, sexually liberated American.
One night, sick of waiting for him to make a move, I invited him for dinner at my tiny shared-dorm kitchen. I cooked a quinoa stir-fry; he brought a bottle of New Zealand wine. I talked at him for the entire date until, both of us full and awkward and a little nervous, he kissed me at last, probably to shut me up. It was mostly chaste, but my body turned into a shaken bottle of seltzer, and I wrapped my arms around his neck to pull him closer. I asked why he took so long, and he paused before admitting he had limited experience in these things and had no idea what to do.
“Most of my friends are girls,” he said. “They’re not really lining up around the block to date me.”
Their loss, I thought.
My journals from that month are filled with page after page about this nerdy Kiwi boy: “He’s such a good listener. He asks questions, then he sits and stares at me when I talk and then he’ll remember what I said weeks later by referencing it again.” (My bar for men was sky high.)
On our first sleepover we stayed awake until three o’clock in the morning, talking about feminism and vegetarianism and every other ism, until our eyes grew heavy and we fell asleep, arms and legs sprawled over and under each other on my twin bed.
“What is happening to me?” I wrote after he left the next morning. “I really really like this guy.”
As I dotted that last period my phone dinged with a text from him. “Last night was … quite wow.” I clutched the phone to my heart.
I extended that first semester in London to two. I’d even started showering again—it was easy when I had the crackling excitement of new love to keep me clean. Why would I go back to Davidson when I had all this?
By that January, Rachel, Aly, and Lauren had returned to their real lives and were replaced by another group of young and eager Americans. I had a life in London away from the program, so I didn’t try to befriend them. I don’t even remember my second roommate’s name; that’s how often I was there. But it didn’t matter, because I had Lewis and his ragtag gang of locals and expats, and I had this city, which delighted me at every corner.
After class, I’d take the tube to Aldgate East while listening to playlists Lewis had made, introducing me to bands that made me feel cool just to know their names. I climbed the stairs out of the station and into the dark streets of London, Anohni and the Johnsons crooning in my ears while I walked the ten minutes to Lewis’s apartment, which sat atop a curry house. He slept on an air mattress in the living room, too cheap to pay for a room to himself. His roommates gave us privacy when they could, leaving the space dark and quiet except for the yellow streetlights pouring a puddle of warm light over the hardwood and the sluice of cars through the rain on the streets below.
From the moment we met, an expiration date was built into our relationship. Even with my semester extension, I’d eventually have to return home to finish college. Our bubble was fragile, and we both knew it would pop, but for now, it was delicate and bright and shiny and neither of us dared exhale.
By April, I was dizzy and breathless. No way could I leave now! I couldn’t afford to stay in my study abroad program, so I applied for a six-month working visa for under-thirties, got a job at a Tex-Mex restaurant in Trafalgar Square (yes, it was as offensive as you might imagine), and moved into a council flat near Mile End with a random South African guy I met on Gumtree, the UK version of Craigslist. I stayed for Lewis, and for the me I was with him. Living in London made me wonder whether my problem was that I didn’t belong in America. Maybe I was born in the wrong country, or maybe my personality was better suited to being a strange person in a strange land.
Years later, I spoke with Sarah Hendrickx, an autistic author and speaker, about this contradiction. How could a small American college experience have destabilized me so completely, while moving to a major global city unlocked a version of me who was resourceful and energetic? Sarah lives in France, though she’s originally from England. Over the phone she told me, “I know many autistic people who feel more comfortable outside their own culture. You still have to look for the social cues, but you’re not actually expected to get them all right. I’m not autistic in France; I’m just foreign. It’s a massive liberation.”
Several other autistics have written about this phenomenon, including Devon Price in Unmasking Autism when he wrote, “No one sees you as an ‘overly sensitive’ disabled person if you’re constantly traveling the world.”
In London I could be eccentric and brassy, but that didn’t mean I was inherently broken—I was just American. After years of feeling inadequate, navigating London on my own made me feel confident and grown-up, even special. The history of the city and constant barrage of newness kept my brain engaged and away from self-hatred. And to be loved by this boy, in his quiet way, meant things must be finally clicking into place.
* * *
ON MY TWENTY-FIRST BIRTHDAY, Lewis and I took a weekend getaway to the gray coastal town of Bournemouth. Even though I was of legal drinking age in the United Kingdom, and we could have gone out to a bar, we bought a bottle of Malibu rum and a chocolate cake from Tesco that we picked at with plastic forks while sitting on the curb of a small park. We walked along the blustery beach, holding hands and bracing ourselves against the wind until we were too cold to stay outside.
Back in our hotel room, Lewis sat me on the floral bedspread and handed me a small box.
“For me?” I asked.
“Of course. Just something from home.”
Inside was a greenstone pendant shaped like a pear with a twist at the top. Lewis had told me how special pounamu was to New Zealanders and Māori culture. You can’t buy it for yourself; it must be gifted. Tucked underneath the pendant was a printed slip of paper. “The twist represents the joining of two people for eternity. They sometimes move away from each other on their own journeys, but they will always come together again sharing their lives and blending to become one.”
Davidson was 3,976 miles away, and my frayed connection to that place snapped, releasing its hold. Here was a life that was mine.
* * *
EVENTUALLY IT WAS AUGUST again. I’d been in England for a year, but I’d burned through every extension and visa to do it. I had to go back to finish my last two semesters at Davidson.
On the day of my flight home, Lewis rode the train with me to the airport, my giant suitcase bulging between my legs, our knees pressed together, hands clasped so tight I couldn’t feel my fingers. I watched my beloved city fly past outside the train windows. Every patch of gray sky, every tenement and motorway, was the most gloriously beautiful thing I’d ever seen.
The closer we inched to Heathrow, the more my chest threatened to collapse in on itself. I gazed at Lewis next to me, and his eyes were unfocused and red around the rims. He caught me staring and pressed his lips together before squeezing my hand.
At the airport, we walked, slow and wordless, to the security line. When he couldn’t take me any farther, we turned to each other. I flung my arms around him and sobbed.
“I can’t do this. I can’t go back.”
“You can,” he muttered into my ear. “I love you.”
We kissed then, furious and damp, vowing to stay together. He waited as I made my way through security, and I looked back at him one last time before turning the corner and leaving him behind. One of us would find our way to the other; we just needed to get through the next year.
10
Buzzkill
Lewis visited me twice at davidson, but the magic was muted, as if muffled by a weighted blanket. Maybe we worked only in the drizzly, romantic streets of London and couldn’t survive the wider world or the reality of my true nature. As much as I loved him, he didn’t know the real me—the girl who didn’t leave the house for days or brush her teeth or go to class or do her homework. He didn’t know who I’d been before he saw me laughing on the hostel floor.
We broke up in January, were back together by Valentine’s, and called it off again in June. I graduated and briefly moved to New York, until Manhattan’s constant haze of urine and the dissonant yell of saxophones on every corner sent me running back to Lewis and London one last, heartbreaking time.
By then Lewis had moved to Leytonstone, a gray, villagey neighborhood nearly an hour outside Central London full of chicken shops and off-licenses and one pub, where he could afford his own room in a narrow brick flat squashed between a dozen other narrow brick flats. Since I’d moved across the world to be with him, I didn’t even bother looking for my own place: I hung my dresses next to his work shirts and called it mine.
The Leytonstone house was a revolving door of cousins and friends who were either related to Lewis, had gone to college with Lewis, or were dating someone related to or college friends with Lewis. They invited me to every costume party, pub trivia, camping trip, indie concert, barbecue, and poker night, laughing and drinking with casual intimacy as I watched, wishing I were anywhere else. I hadn’t noticed this before we lived together, or maybe it hadn’t existed in the early days of our love cocoon where we didn’t need or want anyone except each other, but now that we shared a home, I was realizing Lewis had a never-ending desire to socialize. I would have been perfectly happy spending evenings alone with him watching movies or making veggie curries.
I usually stayed at the flat and stewed in resentment that he needed more than me. Some nights, in an attempt to silence the girl who had moped around Davidson like a lazy ghost, I forced myself to tag along, which went about as well as you can imagine.
One night, Lewis invited me out to meet an old friend of his from New Zealand. My British visa was only temporary, so we’d decided to move to his hometown of Auckland, where I could live and work freely. It was a big move, so he thought it’d be nice for me to make some friends before we arrived. I was in the middle of trying to make it as a freelance writer, which usually meant twelve-hour days for terrible pay, so I was sluggish and uninterested in leaving the flat, never mind spending an hour on the tube, then needing to focus all my energy and attention on conversations with people I didn’t care about, but I pushed through, because that’s what people in their twenties do.
We met at a small British pub, but it felt like a Taylor Swift concert. Lewis and his friends were seated at a tall round table near the center of the room, and they gave big smiles when they spotted me. The music thumped through my body like a hammer and I couldn’t manage a smile back. Cool start, Marian. I made an excuse to grab a drink and tried to pull myself together.
My personal version of hell is trying to get a bartender’s attention. Was everyone else given a manual on how to do this? Do you push between two people chatting on barstools? Do you shout? Lift a hand? (Is that rude?) And where’s the line? Is it like a four-way stop sign, and if so, are we supposed to let the person to our right go before us, or the person who arrived first? But at a long bar full of twenty people sitting and ten others waiting, how do you keep track? WHAT ARE THE RULES?
