Babylon

The windows of the plane were like sheets of paper, white, against the backdrop of an overcast sky. I’d never seen that sky before. Whether imagination or not, it seemed so very different from my sky at home. I felt a leaden bolus form in the depths of myself. It rose like a lump at the thought of emerging to stand under that unfamiliar sky, of breathing the strange air. Would it taste wrong? How did I end up here?
The Heathrow main terminal was an impressive, sprawling form. I watched it as the plane slowed and came to a stop. I stared at it more as I waited for the soft note that would announce the de-lumination of the seatbelt light. And I eyed it further as I started to disembark. It filled the plane portholes intermittently. It didn't beckon, simply sat and waited. Maw wide for me to pass through. I could imagine myself on the other side of those doors. But I couldn’t see if I was alright. The glass and my future were so very opaque, infuriatingly so. I’ve never felt more of a stranger.

Upon emerging, onto a grey street, into a bright but cloudy British day, my nerve cocktail, that ball in my belly, rose and hitched higher up. For what greeted me was nothing short of miraculous. Buildings the colour of caramel looked down through glass eyes bordered in carved white. They had grey eyebrows that moved and flapped. I did a double take and looked closer. Ah, yes, the famous London pigeons. Across from where I gaped, men and women stood in an anonymous line, each staring down wind at a magnificent red people carrier, trundling closer. On a screen above its driver, blazed the number 207 and the promise: Hayes-by-Pass to White City. Black cabs, brobningnagian beetles, announced themselves like celebrities. They chased the double-deckers.
Someone brushed by me. I broke from my daze. All around, things moved and glinted and at my feet, countless pieces of fossilized gum made pebble-like pathways that led away in both directions. I saw possibility then. That lump inside me gave way and I looked down street to where St. Paul’s Cathedral loomed. It was the city that had welcomed me. She’d rushed at me as I stepped from the dark and with the simplest of scenes, she’d urged me to go…discover. I listened. I adjusted my pack, went left, stopped, turned around, went the other way, and strode into the greatest two years of my life.