WALKING ELSEWHERE

BY KELLI J. SMITH

Two summers ago, I woke up on one of our last mornings in London just as the sun started to rise. It was the last place in England I would see before the dreaded return to the Midwest.

My bed, fortunately positioned below the ledge of the east-facing window, allowed an abundance of light to flood my eyes at the very first opportunity. Keenly aware of myself again, I grew convinced that this would be my only chance to wander while everyone else still slept. In times like these, you find yourself belting your skirt and quickly moving along Westminster bridge at a pace from which no one can derail you, and without giving it another semblance of thought.

It was everything that I had ever read about, a fair June morning just like Clarissa Dalloway’s, walking among the oscillating quiet and commotion that wavers just as the formation of London streets do. It had been an abnormally sunny week in England, enough so that the stuffed animal dropped upright on the foundation of that green bridge looked eerily like new. I curiously photographed it for a chance to theorize a backstory, but it was much too early in the walk to pause for anything, so I carried on. Crossing the River Thames so early in the day hadn’t been on our collective agenda, but I was glad to make it so on my own accord. I had the bridge mostly to myself that morning, a somewhat unnerving realization as light had only begun to cast itself over Big Ben. It was under construction that summer, a fact brimming with an indecipherable degree of irony on one’s first--and possibly only--trip to London in a lifetime. I soon discovered that seeing the smaller machinations of the city wasn’t something I disliked, but preferred. It grew more evident as the day progressed.

As the London Eye got smaller and that poor abandoned stuffed dog more obscure, it seemed my world did quite the opposite. With only a few short hours until everyone started to wake up, I urgently told myself that the nature of this small excursion was fleeting, and thus should be something both specific and memorable. So, I walked and walked, only stopping to document something I saw on a bench or grab a cup of coffee from a Pret-A-Manger. Looking up from my cup of coffee, I noticed that I had found myself across from a sign that pointed to a place entitled “The Museum of Happiness,” a very

disorienting realization to have without any moral support. After briefly pondering what it might be, I resolved to avoid it. I figured that there was far more happiness in the movement of the morning than whatever that was.

Past the river, or maybe just past 6am, London possessed far more life. Piccadilly circus was littered with groups of students, tourists and businesspeople, most of whom appeared to be headed somewhere in particular — very unlikely the same somewhere, unless it was a morning visit to the National Portrait Gallery. The myriad of gift shops plastered in the faces of the royals and seas of keychains were a campy juxtaposition to the granite and cobblestone. Hyde Park maintained the same variations of life. Bundles of contradictions piled upon one another in a singular space in a way that garnered a significance greater than the acres one could wander. Sound and light delicately splintered itself through the trees in the southwest corner of the park through which I had entered. Foliage hovered above me and I felt an encompassing warmth in the transience of walking in silence, somehow still surrounded by 14 million people. It was there I truly realized the comfort in being elsewhere, alone, and terribly aware.

For those several hours, I paced continually, only inhibited by the overwhelming sense that I needed to return before everyone else woke up. That moment eventually came, and I soon found myself back upon Westminster Bridge, again wondering how the toy had gotten there, moving at the same pace in the opposite direction. This time, my path brimmed with photographers and cherry-colored double-decker busses. The sun was suspended in full. I returned and acted as though I had merely gone downstairs for an early breakfast and a chance to read in solitude. I never told anyone. It was a moment of my own. A similar ritual has continued ever since that morning and in every new place I’ve found myself, in a profuse and thoughtful effort to decipher peculiarities at any given opportunity. You can trade a stroll through Hyde Park for one down Hollywood Boulevard or along the outskirts of Pike Place Market and reach the same conclusion I did that summer. It is always humbling to walk exhaustively alone somewhere unfamiliar. I think that’s because in the strange moments such as these, you feel much closer to the world.