My writing tends towards the metaphorical, the comparison-laden nearly inarticulate descriptions of everyday material turned quasi-monster, spiritual-explosive. Sometimes, I promise people who regularly read what I produce that I’ll stop using metaphors, that I’ll get down to the real business, that I’ll be literal.
I took a class with Megan and Kelsey last winter with Ron Carlson, whose mild detestation of subtlety and unrealistic language completely revolutionized my approach to crafting fiction. I wrote a short story on a writing teacher that--I’ll admit--wasn’t too far removed from my experience in Ron’s class, and though this teacher was clearly impeded in his brilliance by the limits of my own understanding, what he had to say was different to whatever I’d ever had to say previously:
- Let’s not be clever. Let’s get entrenched in the literal, in the visceral movement through time, through rooms, through dirty streets and smoggy air, through train rides and sick days and dogs that pee on the doormat.
I don’t know, in exact words, why I’ve opened a post about my trip to Brighton in this way, except to say this, something someone else has already said, but to apply it to a different context:
- ‘The modernists offer a model of “secular sacred”: a way of seeing aspects of human experience itself as set apart, venerable, inviolable. If the modernists’ use of words like “sacred,” “reverence,” “sanctity,” “magic,” and “soul” are not quite orthodox, they are nonetheless more than merely metaphorical.’
You might have noticed this before now, but I’ve named this blog after a line from “Song of Myself” by Walt Whitman, who also embraced this ideology, if not half a century before the English Modernists began to embody it in their poetry and novels. Yes, “you shall possess the good of the earth and sun” not because the corners of the earth hold opportunity as vast and beautiful as the sun but because you’re a human being and your body, spiritual, good, beautiful in its humanity, is capable of containing these.
And this isn’t news to you if you’ve been put through American primary school, if you’re an English major at an American university or a literature major in any other country of Western civilization, but Whitman’s poetry also conveys his belief in the translatability of this spirituality across, then, the ethnic and racial boundaries society set, the prejudice against homo- and bisexuals, and this about Whitman made him incredibly sympathetic, compassionate, and a sensitive writer; though not lacking brazen, incredible courage. Each writer’s writing is confessional in a way, all writing is semi-autobiographical, and while Whitman wrote about other people he was always writing himself; while he was working against much of society’s rules he was also for something bigger: for things well-known and well-regarded like social equality for African-Americans and women, for freedom of expression for all sexualities; and while much of what’s striking about Whitman is his mastery of natural imagery--grass, eagles, trees, wood, silver, the sun, the earth--he’s writing about people, human capacity, human dignity, grace, failures, iniquities, numinousness, sadness and universality.
What I mean to say, how I mean to introduce this post: the landscape changes, I’ve been to different places and I’ve liked some better than others, but I’ve always been myself, mutable and self-destructive and full of potential. And the people, everywhere, despite the misunderstandings, the impossibility of translating everything about the American mindset to a British one, or the other way around--people are still good, people are still stupid, people are still beautiful and human.
Metaphors aren’t metaphors for the sake of comparison--they’re doing something bigger, they’re telling a truth that other forms aren’t capable of containing, or dusting off.
* * *
This train ride was going to have three changes. I’d only been to London and back, before, and hadn’t had to make any. I’d exit the first train at London Liverpool, take the tube to London Bridge, hop on another train to Brighton, and then transfer to a train to Falmer, which Angela’d told me was “right on campus.” I couldn’t picture what that’d be like, and I didn’t know anything about where I was going to be when I got off at the last stop except that Megan and Angela would come to retrieve me.
The first train left from Norwich Railway Station at 19:30. I got to the station at 18:30 and sat in the cold, walking around, watching the list of departures and platforms scroll continuously until I saw my train for London Liverpool was at platform 4. After a brief struggle with the ticket barriers, I dragged my dark pink suitcase--full to the brim with blanket and duvet, as I planned to sleep on the floor--over the threshold, walked to the end of the train and boarded after pressing the flashing “ <> open” button on one of the sets of doors.
I didn’t have a reservation for this train and I felt a surge of adrenaline as I realized this train looked really different to the ones I’d ridden before--there were sections of seats facing each other and others in pairs lined up facing forward on the side of the train. I found a place where two seats faced three at the front of the car and dragged my suitcase to the empty space between seats and sat nervously. As other people entered the car, I heard them asking each other: “This is the 19:30 to London Liverpool...?” and the general consensus was, yes, it is, so I sat back and peeled open my American edition of To the Lighthouse.
After the train pulled out from the station and I had already resigned myself to the fact that I was on this train whether or not it was the correct one, the rolling screen turned on and the train’s lady voice announced that this was the train for “London Liverpool Street” several times. I had my ticket placed on my lap in my oystercard holder, waiting for a conductor to pass through and make sure I had one, but for the almost-two hours, nobody passed through.
The thing I remember most about the train ride is that it was loud and extremely bumpy; I had a hold on my suitcase the whole time to keep it from falling over; when I underlined in my book, unless we’d come to a smooth patch and I had a moment of reprieve to make a straight line, the pen flew wildly, intersecting words and punctuation. I’m going to remember underlining these things on a train, in England, even when I’m old, I thought to myself several times. I’ve had this experience quite often while I’ve been here: I’m going to remember this, I’ll think, making extra effort to try to remember, as one does when one’s about to fall asleep and has to remember something in the morning upon waking.
London Liverpool is large and white and always crowded. It’s clean, shiny. To get off this train you have to push the button to open the doors, but I didn’t know this, so I stood staring at the flashing “<> open” buttons until someone behind me reached around and pushed one, and the doors open, and I leapt out of the car and ran to the ticket barrier, pulling my suitcase through unceremoniously.
I’d been through this station a couple times so I walked quickly to the tube and loaded a couple pounds on my oystercard before walking down and up stairs, dragging my suitcase behind me noisily, laboriously, to the platforms to the Northern Line. I knew I needed to take this line to London Bridge but I didn’t know what direction to go; pulling out my small tube map I somehow decided to stand at the Northbound platform line, and I hung around a few minutes pacing on the platform before I saw the map on the wall and realized that it was going in the opposite direction of London Bridge. The train was just arriving at the Southbound platform and I turned around to run to catch it, breathing loudly and unapologetically.
I’ve written extensively about the woes of carrying luggage on the tube, but it can be done correctly. The trick is doing everything opposite to what I did on my first day in England. You don’t take a seat unless nobody’s going to get on the train or not a lot of people are and that’s not really a probability in London ever, so you don’t take a seat. You stand near the door and hold your luggage against the seats with your legs and stand facing the door, with one or both (if you’re me) hands on a provided handrail. You stand no matter how long your journey is and you stay silent and unbothered while people watch you; men in business suits with no luggage, other internationals, and the newspaper-reading older gentlemen in casual-wear who glance up at you when you have to readjust your stance so as not to fall over. I have notoriously bad luck standing on public transportation; I have terrible coordination unless I focus on nothing else. On the tube, somehow, I can focus on standing and still notice everybody watching me, clearly a foreigner with a piece of luggage completely full, the same piece of luggage I used to pack three months’ worth of things when I first arrived, now employed for a long weekend trip.
London Bridge is wheelchair friendly, which means there’s not a gap between the train floor and the floor of the platform, so it was easier to drag my luggage out. When I exited the train I glanced around for the lift, and unable to locate it, I stared at the staircase determinedly for a moment and moved toward it, but a man next to me in a Jellabiya half-covered by a hoodie asked me if I needed help up the stairs. First I said “no, I’m okay,” but then he asked if I was sure and I considered: can I do it? I didn’t know, but I allowed him to take it up the stairs, thanking him more than was necessary, and aware of it, but unable to stop. He handed it back at the top of the stairs with a modest head nod in response to my thanks, and then took it up another staircase for me. I probably thanked him--what?--another two-hundred times? But I really was grateful, even touched. When he left me the second time I tried not to smile into the middle distance but wasn’t quite successful, and wondered if I looked very smug or suspicious.
London Bridge is as big, or perhaps bigger than, London Liverpool Street, but it’s nowhere near as clean and smells of, as the British say, piss. I stood for a few minutes in front of the list of departures and determined I needed platform 6, towards which I had to walk up several ramps and past a lot of people standing around or going the other way.
This was a different station, one where trains pass through rather than arrive or depart as they do in Norwich or London Liverpool. The trains come on time, or are a few minutes late and well-reported to be so, and remain at the platform for a couple minutes, then pull out. It starts again.
It began to rain. I found a spot on a bench before the platform got very crowded. I was twenty or so minutes early for my train to Brighton at 22:12. I watched three pull in and out before mine came. I watched people run in the rain to catch their trains at the platform across the rails. I noticed these trains were smaller inside and had less seats; I didn’t see luggage racks in them, and I decided then and there that no matter how hard the floor anywhere, ever, I wasn’t taking my duvet with me travelling again.
When the train came I ran up towards the front, where less people were boarding and more seats were available. I was wet with rain, my hair plastered down, and tired, having been out and travelling for almost four hours by now. I pulled my suitcase into a spot where a lady was reading on the other side and tried to stay out of the way. Two drunk men in suits I’d noticed singing on the platform were in this car and I thought about moving, especially when they started singing “What Makes You Beautiful” in atrocious harmony, but I think after a while I was frozen into my seat. I heard something crackle like ice when I moved for the reading lady to exit before Gatwick. The singers got off there; I noticed a window was open on the other side of the car and stared at it hoping it’d close if I was earnest enough.
A man came in and sat on the other side, near the window, and by this point I was marveling at how my feet felt like rocks of ice, and how I nearly couldn’t feel my fingers. He stood up and tried to push the window closed, but it was open resolutely and wouldn’t. I sighed deeply as he sat down, disappointed. I patted my backpack consolingly.
This man left after a couple more stops and his seat was taken up by a man I knew was going to talk to me; I smiled politely as he looked over my luggage and rested my chin on my backpack in my lap for warmth.
“So’re yeh goin’ome r n atrip?”
I stared at him for a moment.
“I’m going to visit friends,” I said, forgetting to mention I was just going for the weekend. He’d already inspected my luggage.
“Ah ah ah I see,” he said, staring at me an extra moment. My accent will do that to people. I do make an extra effort to be understood, but we had very different ideas of how things should be pronounced, so I’m not sure there was much hope.
“Where y’comin frem?”
“Well--” I hesitated, because I couldn’t tell if he meant where are you from or where’d you start your journey so I said, after a moment, “I’m going to uni up in Norwich, but I’m from...well, I’m from California.”
“Well,” he said, leaning back slightly and almost laughing, “I ked tellche wern frem aroun’ here!”
I smiled, trying not to be ironic. Trying, really, not to grimace, or smirk, or do anything exceptionally American.
“S’yu go’te uni up’n Norwich, m?”
“Yeah--University of East Anglia,” which I had to repeat because the train was loud and I have a hard time making myself heard. He nodded.
“I been t’Norwich uns, lovly li’l town,” he said, nodding at me with a hint of irony. I cleared my forehead.
“I like it,” I said staunchly.
“War’ye goin’ to in Brigh’n?” he asked after he said some things which I clearly could not understand. I tried not to look sorry.
“My friends go to the University of Sussex,” I said uncertainly, but he appeared to know exactly where that was.
“Ah, s’yur goin’t transfer to Falmer,” he said, and I nodded, and then he said “alksdjhfl aksjd fhlkajs hdflk jadflskjd lskjhds lkfjhl akghv dh flkasdjh lkajhdsfl k ajshdflkv asjdhflkv ahjsdfkj hasdlk jhflka djfhlzsd” and I smiled neutrally, and then he told me that I should go to the right to get to Falmer and I nodded and took down this direction. When he got up to leave he said “welp this’s me,” and then advised me not to have too much beer. I laughed without hesitation.
He appeared to reconsider as he stepped off onto the platform.
“Not too much cider,” he amended before the doors closed. I put my face in my hands.
At Brighton, I got off the train and exited the platforms only to realize my train was already there and I needed to get on it to make sure I got a seat for my suitcase, but my ticket didn’t work going back through the barriers so I had to sneak through when the handicap barrier opened up to let people through and I wasn’t doing anything wrong but it still felt strange. I got on the train across from a girl wearing owl headphones with an owl handbag and looked out the window; which isn’t easy at night, but I was intent on ignoring the fact I had so much luggage with me and had just behaved incorrectly at a train station.
A section of seats ahead of me, there was a boy drunk to the point of tears, saying things like “What’s the point?! I just don’t want to be alive anymore, I can’t do anything, but I love English Literature and that’s all that matters, I just, I just loved the play we did for A-levels I was so, so, so in love with that and NOW I CAN’T DO ANYTHING, it’s okay, it’s okay, you’ve been this drunk before--the only reason I am alive is because I love literature, it’s just the best thing, I just feel really like myself reading, I love to analyze it all and it’s so good and I love it so, so much...” There was a guy with him taking him home, I think, because the boy--whose name, I gathered, was Christian--was so drunk and sick with it, and the boy kept saying that his friend should just go home because this wasn’t a good way to spend a Friday night and he was such a good friend. I watched mildly, startled to see how bloodshot the boy’s eyes were. I buried my face in my backpack when the train started and listened to more about how amazing literature is and how blank is life and how we have to choose what our lives mean and his means nothing without books or poems.
I felt like, in another life--but I won’t go into it.
Several people got off at the stations between Brighton and Falmer, and when we pulled into that station a well-dressed boy, probably my age, noticed my luggage and asked if I needed help with it, and I felt slightly flustered because nobody at home would have asked and I wasn’t sure how to react and I said, “I’m alright,” because the platform was literally two feet away and he smiled and walked quickly out of the train and out of sight. I wondered for the first time all night what I looked like; I was probably a mess; but I was here and triumphant after all the confusion of strange trains and strange unintelligible conversations with locals. I realized now what the man meant about going right--there were no signs at this part of the platform, so I went right until I saw signs pointing toward “University of Sussex.”
I exited the station and parked myself and my luggage in parking space 7, watching the outline of the well-dressed boy disappear onto campus. I pushed up my hood and pulled the drawstrings until my face was swathed in cheap-hoodie fabric and said “WHY DID I SAY NO” into the clear black night several times. The ground was wet. I looked at my phone to see a text from Megan: “we coming.”
“I’m here!” I texted, and then, “In parking space seven.”
I waited for a few minutes, five, perhaps, walking back and forth between the lines of the space, trying to be warm. That was the coldest train ride ever! I whispered into the air, puffing out my breath like a dragon, waving my arms.
Two guys came up behind me and I pinned my arms to my side, loosening the drawstrings on my hood, standing at attention.
“Where’s the nearest bus stop?” one of them asked me.
“Um,” I said, then looked around like I’d see it and point it out magically. “I don’t actually know, I’m visiting here,” I said and smiled apologetically.
“Cheers,” one of them said, and I couldn't tell if it was sarcastic, so I waited until they were gone and then pulled my drawstrings tight again, engaging the air above my face in a punch-out.
After a while of spinning in vague circles, I noticed three outlines of people walking in the complete opposite direction, coming from the sign that said “University of Sussex.” I could tell Megan by her way of walking, and Angela in the lead, and someone I didn’t know with them.
“Megan?” I shouted, and Megan didn’t turn but the other girl did, tall and thin, and said, “she’s over there!”
“Hi!” and I waved largely, pulling up the bar on my luggage and pulling it noisily over the wet asphalt. They saw me and I watched in mild fascination as Angela released a bellow into the night and came running at me. I released one hand from my luggage and caught her in her running hug, though was almost pushed over backwards by her velocity.
A high-pitched stream of “eeeeee!” pierced the relative quiet 23:45 night sky.
“I’ve missed you!!!” Angela squealed.
“I missed you, too,” I said, squinting at Megan over Angela’s shoulder.
“It’s been a whole week,” Megan said, smiling slightly, and when I extricated myself from Angela’s grip Megan introduced me to Kai, their flatmate.
“She’s American,” Megan said, and I saw Kai almost take her hand out of her jacket pocket to shake mine so I held mine out until she shook it and it felt awkward but I don’t blame myself entirely because I’d been travelling for six hours at this point and I’d just been almost murdered by a running-leap hug.
“Did you hear me say where the hell is parking space seven?” Megan asked, laughing. I said no, but that explained how they were headed in the complete opposite direction to where I was standing.
We walked into campus, through a tunnel, over paths, by buildings and a huge library.
“This is the slope,” they said when we got to East Slope.
“Wo--”
“We live on East Slope! What did you think it would be?”
“I don’t know,” I said, feeling slightly desolate. I hadn’t even known they lived on East Slope. A quarter of the way up, feeling strangely energetic, I said, “you waited until I came here to tell me about this, I see, I get it, okay,” and then several other nonsense things of the same caliber.
“There’s more slope up there,” Kai said, smiling, and I squinted.
“There’s more slope, of course there is,” I said, panting. I had three layers on and was beginning to feel uncomfortably warm.
“And then stairs,” Megan said.
I can’t tell you exactly how, except for with many pauses and very slowly, I made it up the second slope and the stairs. But I did. Megan said something about how the houses were “little piggy houses,” and I saw what she meant, even in the darkness with half-vision, tired from pulling around a duvet in my suitcase full of more clothes than I should have brought. They were small and brick and close to each other; the stairs were narrow and the houses were narrow and when I got inside everything seemed three-quarter sized. At the door, I heard and half-saw Mia--whom they call the “mother” or “mom” of the flat--squashing a mosquito eater with a piece of tupperware. At a dramatic reprieve Megan, Angela, and Kai all parted and I saw inside, where Mia said, “welcome to our flat” ceremoniously and I let Kai take my suitcase down the corridor to her room, where we’d decided I would sleep in her extra bed.
I remember saying, “this is a nice-sized room!”
And Kai saying, “Yeah, for me,” and I said, “well, even for two people,” because it was bigger than the room I shared at UCI, and then Megan and Angela dragged me down to their room; down a narrow staircase, past a small kitchen, past a small dining room, and down a corridor whose sensor-lights flickered feebly and didn’t turn on until we were into the room already. I forget what we did, but soon we were heading back up the stairs and down the hall to Kai’s room, because I wanted to do something there, I forget what, exactly.
I wasn’t allowed to make it all the way down the hall because a boy had poked his head out and Megan introduced him to me as “Papa Joe” which is more than slightly strange to an outsider, but I tried to be polite.
“He has a cool rug,” she said, pointing to his pile carpet. I was slightly jealous; rugs at UEA are considered a fire hazard, as are most other things someone could want in a room.
“That is cool,” I nodded, and then she pointed at his shirt.
“He has a shirt with a giraffe on it,” she said.
I felt like rolling my eyes and crying at the same time but instead I stared at it for an awkward moment and said, “Also cool.”
I don’t remember what else we said, but Megan pointed out that this was a room they used frequently to congregate. I remember smiling until my face hurt, which probably didn’t look nice, and somehow, I made it to Kai’s room and looked at my face in a mirror she had hanging almost too high for my shortness; wanting to cry at my reflection but refraining with a certain resignation--isn’t that every day? I ask--and then walk down to the kitchen where Megan has a store of Smirnoff Ice and she pours me a glass, bringing the bottle up with her to “Joe’s room,” where “everyone is,” where “people go.”
* * *
On the way to the flat, in the cold, still buzzing alive in the cold, Megan and Kai run me through the names for different ways to fall.
“Falling up the stairs is a Pooja,” she says, and then Kai adds, “falling down is a Nonie,” and I learn that just falling is an “Angela.”
I told Mom about how I “Pooja’d” and how Angela “Angela’d” at the top of the stairs and the names for these falls between manic gasps for breath over Skype, and what she says before anything is “Your friends are just as clumsy as you are!”
And then, remembering she is a mother: “Don’t break anything.”
* * *
I sit down on Joe’s bed with Megan feeling really claustrophobic and still hot from my walk up the slope with suitcase in tow, and Megan tells me things about her people and points out the keyboard on Joe’s desk to which I reply--predictably-- “cool”--and pours me a second drink and Angela, from the floor, watching me, asks, “Lily, are you a heavyweight or a lightweight?”
People go quiet.
“I--don’t know,” I admit, and then Megan says, “I think she’s a heavyweight, she’s really sober right now,” and I argue, though I don’t know why, “I’ve only had--!” and somehow, we move on to other topics eventually, while I wonder if I should have taken off my shoes, and Megan pours me another drink, one of Kai’s Breezer, and they talk about how it tastes like a cocktail they like. Mia’s on her second cider (which may have been her fourth, I can’t remember) and Kai’s finishing off the Breezer. At this point, I’m really tired, and I’ve had four glasses of various things, and I remember saying--
“No! Not peach!” before Megan and Angela realize they have to go pick up Kelsey in town. Kai decides to go with them, or Megan bullies her into it, but they all have bus passes, so they all leave. I remember, though vaguely, telling Mia and maybe Joe that I had to go check my email, retreating to Kai’s room, casting a glance at my laptop, getting onto the bed and pulling my blanket over me, then getting up to get my laptop, putting it by my face, and laying down.
* * *
I wake up at around 3 AM because I hear Kelsey, Megan, and Angela downstairs. I walk out, hear voices in Joe’s room next door, and walk downstairs, knock on Angela and Megan’s door.
“You fell asleep!”
“Yes.”
“Did you hear us come to check on you?”
“No,” I say, squinting.
“Megan was like, ‘oh, she’s so cute I just want to hug her!’”
"How does a sleeping person look ‘cute’?” I ask skeptically, sitting down. “I was just sleeping--”
And to be quite honest, I don’t remember much else of the night, except for that Kelsey was there and I somehow got my laptop down to the room for Angela to set up with the internet there. It was late when we went to bed--we didn’t decide on a time to get up but we were going to the pier the next day, something I was excited for--having been told before to visit, feeling hopeful, I suppose, and happy. And very, very tired.
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