I was 21 when I lived in London for a year.  I had no hips and was still carrying around the last bit of baby fat in my cheeks.  I was wide-eyed.  I hadn't learned how to carry myself or carry on a sophisticated conversation or remain cool and aloof in social situations to maintain a sort of mystique.  I threw myself into those sorts of things with the deftness and enthusiasm of a young puppy.  I wore bobby socks and clodhoppers and short skirts.  I had my hair cut in a messy pixie that I changed the color of frequently.  I wrote in a journal that I'd covered inside and out with pictures from magazines I found beautiful or inspiring so that the blank pages weren't so intimidating.  I filled it with words, notes, quotes, concert tickets, the only journal I've ever finished.  I got on random buses and wandered the streets of London in the rain and fog with no destination in mind. 

I was finding out for the first time that I could be considered attractive and be sought after, and that was a strange thing for me to consider.

I chose the dark horse.  He was 36, old to me at the time.  Tall, lithe, bald, deep voiced, earringed, tattooed, confident in his own skin in a way I wasn't yet.  He sketched and danced and taught me how to cook vegetarian meals.  I sat on the tiny kitchen counter in his flat in Shepherds Bush and swung my socked feet like a child.  He was divorced and wild and free and sad and jaded.  What started as an experimental fling soon became an inescapable vortex where we were hopelessly and overwhelmingly attracted to each other and picked at each other's scabs to try to keep from getting too close and vulnerable.  He called me immature and annoying.  I threw Humbert Humbert accusations at him.  Then we'd throw ourselves back at each other with a redoubled intensity, going to deeper and darker places that left me both exhilarated and in tears in the morning when I would slink back in the previous night's clothes to London Bridge on the Central Line.  12 stops to Bank.  Mind the Gap.  Spend the morning soaking the soreness away in the bathtub.  He saw me off on the train to the airport when I left England for good.  He confessed to me that he probably wouldn't have gotten involved if I hadn't had the ticket out of the country, that he'd already tried to settle down once and been burned, that he didn't want the responsibility and commitment and the errands and chores and weekend trips to the hardware store.  He told me there would be a time when I'd grow disillusioned with the idea of living happily ever after.  I told him there would be a time when he would feel the urge to settle down and try again.  We each turned out to be right about the other.

I went back to America a little older, and a good bit...wiser I suppose.  My family remarked frequently about how much I'd matured in my year abroad.  I said nothing and licked my wounds in private.  There are some things I don't discuss with my mother.

We still talk, though for a while we couldn't.  He sent me yellow roses once in the year after I returned to New Orleans and I deposited them directly in the trashcan.  Time has passed and faded a lot of the old hurts, though I think I still bear the scars.  Sometimes I catch him online in the mornings before I go to work.  We check on each other from time to time, he commenting on my pictures and videos, me watching him change his mind about settling down again after all.  She's another dark, long-limbed, long-nosed, pixie haired girl who takes portraits of herself every day.  They've moved into his old flat in Cambridge and blog about clearing brambles from the garden.  I'm not the unspoiled girl I was when I met him anymore, the fresh canvas he could doodle on and wreck at his leisure; I'm all grown up, with all the experience and comfort and strength and scars and baggage and cynicism that goes along with it.  I get the impression sometimes that he still thinks of me as the young girl I was, and wonder what he would think if he saw me now.  If he'd even recognize me, my hair longer, my face thinner, my hips wider, my eyes blazing, my shoulders back and my body carrying the burden of the disasters I've shouldered and survived.

I've made a lot of safe choices in long-term partners since then, feeding upon them like a vampire, stealing bits of their stability and grounding for my own purposes, playing house and settling down for the long-term.  I've loved them dearly, but never in the all-encompassing, soul-baring, self-destructive way that I loved him.  Neither choice has panned out into the marriage and house and kids that I've always kind of planned on for whatever reason, and I'm at a loss as to what to try now, aside from yoga in an effort to ground myself on my own without preying upon a romantic partner, massage work to leech out the old traumas in a metaphysical bloodletting.  I am much changed these last three weeks.  More comfortable with the idea of living for myself and working on myself.  Less sure through and through of this person I'm becoming.  I feel suddenly older.  I don't mourn for my last relationship very much anymore.  I catch little flashes of him lurking around corners and in crannies of this house: rolling over and looking at me in the morning with the sunshine pouring through the window, or standing in the doorway in the kitchen in his boxers and a t-shirt, the strength and stockiness of his arms.  They feel foreign and detached and strange when I come across them.  He's hiding from me and from the destruction he's wrought, which is making it easier for me to forget the love I thought I had for him.

He hadn't been gone two days when new suitors started tiptoeing closer.  They email and call and text message me three at a time, causing me to juggle and work to keep the threads of conversation straight.  I'm not sure what to do with any of them.  I half-heartedly try them on for size in my head and shrug.  One is as lost and down as I am, and he's the one I go to occasionally when the emptiness of the house and the stress of limbo and transitions gets to be too much.  We stay up all hours of the night watching independent films, elbows and feet slowly getting tangled, both of us understanding the devastation in the other.  I stay the night or return home with the same amount of indifference.  Mostly I muster up enough motivation to return home.  We're tiding each other over and I think we know it.  Ashley's asked me once where I've been.  I told her "out," and she didn't press the matter further.

This is the last week living in this limbo where I've been abandoned.  Ashley's already moved out, Bradley's snuck in while I've been at work and taken everything but a few pieces of his furniture.  I plan to get my stuff out of the house this weekend, trading this limbo for another where I hunker down and wait and see where I'm supposed to go next.  I suppose it's preferable.

Somewhere on the streets of London, the ghost of my young self is still wandering, unbroken, idealistic, optimistic, having adventures, brimming with possibilities and potential.  It makes me feel better to think she's still out there, out of my current sight, possibly waiting for me to rediscover her in the future.