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  • Writer's pictureCarlo Rey Lacsamana

Who am I without you? (One Day Postcards From London)



1. Who am I without you?—I ask myself as I watch through the plane window the view of the houses, the hills, and the sea recede into the mist. Everything before me is temporary. Transience gives weight to everything. The plane steadies itself above the clouds. The summer moon still hovers behind the early morning blue sky. The sun spitting its glossy brilliance at a slow pace. The roar of the engine and the screaming baby at the back row enwrap the entire plane. Such are the sounds of modern life: machines and screams.

2. As everything disappears beneath the smoke of clouds, even you, I am reminded of a line in Elizabeth Bishop’s poem: “Then practice losing farther, losing faster: places and names, and where it was you meant to travel.” But I tell myself to practice slowly. To lose everything slowly. To forget slowly. To leave slowly, secretly, at dawn.

3. We are not meant to view the clouds from this point. At this height one easily loses track of what truly matters. Our eyes were made below the clouds so we could watch and care for each other.

4. To travel is to be less and less of yourself.

5. I arrive at Liverpool station around 10am London time. In your place you are probably still sleeping in your room. The curtains still drawn. On the balcony the cat lingers like a sphinx watching the turtledoves perched on a TV antenna cooing the blues of the morning. On the other side of where you’re lying down countless farewells take place at the whistle of a train you cannot hear.

6. The great modernist writer Virginia Woolf writes in one of her essays: “to escape is the greatest of pleasures.” She is primarily talking about escaping into the streets of London. The exotic urban pleasure London streets offer you will find nowhere else in other great cities. I imagine myself bumping into Virginia Woolf in one of these streets and stealing a kiss on her cheek.

7. There are scenes in London Bridge which evoke my boyhood city of Manila. Like the tenderness of looking at old photographs.

8. London weather is a dagger.

9. Even a London bus ride is hauntingly charming.

10. “Enjoy your stay in London cheers man!” says a handsome blond guard patrolling the promenade along the Thames. Such a warm welcome that makes you forget that the world is full of shit.

11. When I travel I enclose myself in wonder.

12. I enter the famous Waterstones Bookshop in Trafalgar Square. I approach the pretty bookseller with a thick blonde curly hair and ask for a book by a certain author. “Unfortunately we don’t have the book right now, but if you can come back in two weeks we can have it reserved for you.” The more you search the more you do not find. The wisdom in not finding what you’re looking for.

13. Some of London’s charming streets are a mixture of familiar English style and the modern. I wouldn’t be surprised if I found you here.

14. The Soho district is palpitating with identities, sexualities, events, and parties. Pubs and cafés are vibrant and gay. Theatre houses here, China town there, nothing grumpy, nothing stationary, everything is moving, almost dancing. Be yourself is the worst, probably the most stupid thing you can advice yourself and other people. Oscar Wilde famously said: “I can resist everything except temptation.” He was probably drinking that night in a pub somewhere in Soho.

15. Harrods: the display of affluence bores me.

16. Piccadilly Circus square: a handful of Zionist fanatics waving an Israeli flag in the middle of the square handing out political leaflets to passersby. People ignore them. Good. It is still sweet to say Fuck Israel! Viva Palestine! I love Palestine! Always Palestine!

17. Pre-pandemic and post-pandemic. I feel I have lived two centuries. Prepare to live again. This is my daily morning prayer.

18. I am eating a plate of sushi on a bench inside Covent Garden. To not take things for granted is to let a new blood rush into your body. Like old cells dying away for new cells to take place. A new spark of life erupts in your consciousness. This time around life is an immense, slow, careful, ambivalent, often dangerous act of reconsideration.

19. So many things one can do in a day it seems limitless. The truth that nothing lasts forever consoles me more than it frightens me.

20. Who am I without you?—I ask myself as I watch the huge screen of departures and arrivals at the Liverpool station. For a day my heart has been taken away elsewhere and I can no longer find it. Maybe it’s just proper that we do not arrive, that we keep wandering in the present until we learn to take a pause to look out the window, to smell the coffee before we drink it, to say our prayers before we believe or doubt, to touch the skin before you hurt it, to smell the breeze before you start walking, to ask for forgiveness before you demand love, to remember before you take a photograph, to take a rest before you proceed. "Since we're bound to be something, why not together," whispers the poet Mary Oliver.

The only travel that is worthwhile is that which transports you back to the beginning, to the place we first met, to a remembrance which belongs to words, to language, to voice, to silence, to sunset.

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