I love the time and in between
the calm inside me
in the space where I can breathe
I believe there is a
distance I have wandered...

-Elsewhere
Sarah Mclachlan

I miss waking up. The dark velvet comforter wrapped
under my chin, burying me softly and completely as
the snow buries the gables of the hotel and the bricks of the
windowsill : sensation of security, of peace, of a little brown
mouse burrowed deep into a nest of cotton and wool. In the
silence before the morning came to consciousness, it was
easy to believe that I was even smaller than the mouse, that the
room and I had been shrunk down to figures in a crystal globe.
Everything was complete-- the blue and cream striped
wallpaper, the charcoal sketch of St. Peter's cathedral hanging
by the mirror, the rebellious heap of chiffon at the foot of the
bed where my dress slid off the hanger during the night-- only
in miniscule. Even the little Christmas tree was perfectly
preserved, a flourish of greenery and red satin and gold beads
balanced precariously in a teapot on the dresser. (I lacked
a proper container and personally never cared much for the
beverage customs of the country in the first place. In that
respect I remained an unabashed Yank.)

I miss the moments after waking up, when your eyes are not
open but they are not shut, when they are something in
between. They are cracked down the middle or at the corners,
allowing one, two, three stray beams of light to float into
view. Gray. Pale gold. Watercolor blue. I knew it was Christmas
morning just by the colors, but perhaps this recognition
attached more closely to the echoes of church bells in then
distance. Bells singing over snow-- a distinctly London sound
I will always hear in the back of my mind when I am alone in
a room. The city becomes part of you that way, and you
become part of it; then when you tried to leave it follows
you, but only because you have left something of
yourself there. You've left it sitting in your room, beside the
bed, like a piece of luggage you meticulously packed then
forgot.

I miss the view from the window, the first thing I saw when I
opened my eyes : a parade of rooftops, stiff and formal in
their powdered snow wigs with the affectation suited to any
English noble. A thousand furnished rooms, Eliot said. One
could see where he got the idea of it. I used to linger in bed,
watching the houses and imagining how each of the rooms were
furnished, who lived in them, and what they were doing at
that moment. A child sleeping with a favorite doll, a man
drinking a tumbler of cognac before work, a woman painting
her mouth with red before a cracked bathroom mirror, a wife
rolling over to wrap her arms around her husband and tell him
to turn off the alarm clock for just ten more minutes. By the
time the week was over, I felt I knew them all quite
personally. I had filled in the blanks of their lives and love and
all the petty inconsistencies in-between. Of course I intended to
write it all down when I returned home, perhaps in a book,
perhaps in a poem, but after I left the city the images faded.
Magic has a pesky habit of disappearing on you once you try
to take it back to reality, and I do admit I resented that. It left
me with the feeling that they had all moved and no one had
bothered to tell me of new addresses or phone numbers. In time
I forgave them, but still wonder on occasion what they are
doing, if someone else has picked them up and is creating
new and different lives for them. What will that other person
see that I missed? What will they forget that I remember?

I miss the knock on the door, his face framed with a wreath
of steam from two dark blue ceramic mugs. Hot chocolate
for both of us, heavy on the marshmallows because drinking
coffee meant we were responsible adults and who wants to
be responsible on Christmas morning? We wanted youth,
chubby-faced, energetic; we wanted to tear down stairs in
flannel pajamas and tear wrapping paper, little spaniels set on
a pile of bones. We wanted to be reckless. At least we had kept
the flannel pajamas, though it was a good bet there would
a substantial of paper carnage as well before the morning was
over.

(Look at you,) I grinned. (Father Christmas himself....)
(Father Christmas? I'm shocked. I'd think you'd have
come up with a more non-gender term of holiday cheer.
Didn't you hear? I'm in England now. They're turning me
into a traditionalist.
Heaven help tradition.
Happy Kwanza, then. Satisfied?
Perfectly. Happy Hanukkah to you too.
You'd never make it as a Jew. You couldn't last two
weeks on a kosher diet.
And you, darlin, can't be English. You don't drink tea.
Shut up and give me the mug, Mr. Can-I-have-a-Molson-
instead.
Keep this up and I'm going to make you wait until after
dinner for your present.
Try it and your room will be ransacked my noon.
Just spare the sock drawer. Not even Magneto would come
between a man and clean socks.
Worse than that, babe. I'm going for your toothbrush.
You wouldn't dare.
Try me.
I'd steal your girly Prada gloves. The leather ones you
dropped two hundred for on Conduit Street. I'd throw them in
the Thames.
Then we'd be swimming on Christmas, wouldn't we?
They do that in Hyde Park, you know. I'd be happy to hold
your clothes for you while you tried to rescue your waterlogged
accessories. You'd be kinda cute as a human icicle.
I'd drip all over your bed linens and clean clothes. I'd be
ruthless.
Ok, ok, truce. Merry Christmas, kid.
Merry Christmas, old man.)

Little conversations like that seemed to last for hours but the
entire week passed within a space of five minutes. In looking back
I recognize the fault : I tried to stretch the time, pull and tug
at each minute until it took forever, but time is like a rubber band.
You can only stretch it so much before it snaps and flies across
the room. You can't even see where it has gone, it moves that fast.
In retrospect, I miss it all. Even the complications-- the lack
of heat in the floorboards, the overpriced cab fares, the soot that
clung to your shoes after you walked the downtown streets, the
pretensions of the very wealthy and the very British. Even the
sadness-- the hitch in my throat when I shut the blinds to the
window and walked out of the room for the final time, leaving
the velvet bed and the striped wallpaper to the next magic-seeker.
Even the goodbyes-- the clerk at the front desk who let me call
home free of charge because it was Christmas morning; the old
security guard who always tipped me off to the best restaurants in
town and insisted to hold the door every time I entered the
building, even though Logan growled at him for it. Nostalgia
colors it all, soft pastel like the hand-tinted photograph of my
grandmother as a girl.

But, if in the end I had to measure it all up, weigh it all out,
the thing I miss the most is my return to London.

You can't go back to a place you've never been.

You can't remember things that haven't happened yet. You
see them, for a while-- like the people in Eliot's furnished
rooms, you see every detail, every color-- but inevitably they
dissolve in the clamor of reality. One by one they fall : clogged
up in traffic jams, wandering lost down streets naked of snow,
knocking in futility at churches where no bells ring, not even
on Christmas. Like fairies, they die the moment they are not
believed. They fade, they shimmer and vanish.

But sometimes, just sometimes, you can bring them back by clapping.
Sometimes-- when I sit alone in a room, when I catch him looking
at me out of the corner of his eye-- the back of my mind tingles
with the echoes of bells over London that I have never heard.

the end.