Chapter 9: Belongs With Me
We ran all the way to the Strand before looking back to see if we had been followed. There we slowed to a swaggering knot, our gait halting in backslapping derision. We laughed—not just at the predicament of the newly indentured Australians, but at me, at my presumptuous American stupidity.
We took a turn south down the narrow, grimy slope of Villiers Street, which poured us like a funnel onto the Victoria Embankment. Huffing with laughter and fear, we glanced down at the river as it curled through the twinkling lights of the city. A cool, musty breeze rolled off the water, carrying with it a wandering mist—more asleep than awake.
Christophe blurted out a string of filthy French expletives before launching into a cinema-quality reenactment of what he now referred to as Le Jugement Dernier.
He mimicked the owner's terrifyingly quiet demeanor—jaw tightened, voice lowered to a near-whisper—before delivering a tour-de-force rendition of the evening’s final proclamation in street-snarling French:
“Simon! Ramène mon putain de champ' !”
At this, I reached into my bag and produced the waylaid bottle, handing it to Sébastien, who accepted it with ceremonial gravity, as if preparing to dispatch it at a guillotine. From his pocket, he produced a blade, a small premeditation. With a swift flick, he decapitated the victim.
The poor cork. All that pent-up ambition—cut off at the throat.
An innocent bystander. A witness to crime.
Champagne erupted with fervor, the frothy spray caught in hilariously elaborate flutes—purloined by Christophe, himself now a full conspirator. Santé was called and honored as the scene dwindled into a small campfire of blunts and champagne, around which we sat, talking in quiet, sparkling words of remembrance for what it was like to be... Close To You.
The sun rose in smoldering glory, witnessing me as I dispatched the bottle against the side of the embankment. Shards of green glass flickered in the morning rays before tumbling into the river. I smiled at the thought of them being swept out to sea. I imagined them washing up on some distant shore—beside shark's teeth and footprints—worn into frosted gems of sea glass by sun, surf, and the dusty embrace of forever.
The plane took off on time, thrusting me into the air in a swift yet decisive departure, not just from London, but from the independence of self-reliance. My parents had indulged my penchant for unnecessary extravagance by enticing me back home with a comfortable seat in business class—a generous yet pointed reminder of where they assumed I believed I belonged. I stared out the window as clouds curled around London, placing it in memory and obscuring it from view.
I sat next to a kind, big-haired woman from Nashville. Laurie was a confident yet wide-eyed accountant completing her first trip to Britain. It had been quite an experience, she recounted—her sharp intellect coiffed in a syrupy drawl.
Though she was disappointed with the food, she'd managed to see as much as she could in five days. A big fan of The Princess of Wales, she was particularly taken by standing at the gates of Buckingham Palace—or, as she put it, "Where Diana lived." I listened politely, without noting that "Diana" lived not far from my old digs in the feathery French pocket south of Kensington.
As I listened obliquely, the cabin compressed around us, recycling air and time into a slow swirl of regret and foreboding. Laurie, unaware of my creeping dismission, cheerfully continued—recounting every highlight, every moment—while my mind began to wander in anxious appraisal.
I took in her chirpy demeanor with a sneaking concern that I'd been trapped in meaningless conversation. A bright red bandanna was tied around her neck in carefully complicated knots of florid compulsion. Her faded denim jacket was adorned with an American flag, complementing dangly star earrings that floated with a flourish of patriotic emotion. The deep-fried vowels of the American South punctuated every remarkable conclusion.
Soon, I was rescued by a cheerful attendant who appeared offering Champagne. Whether by slip or defiance, I nodded santé to Laurie as our glasses met above the Atlantic. She smiled in polite confusion, her eyes narrowing just slightly, apparently uncertain how to respond. Then, suddenly, a crack appeared in her facade as she stated flawlessly:
"À la vôtre!
Comme disait Voltaire, 'Il faut cultiver notre jardin.' Vous revenez cultiver le vôtre, n'est-ce pas?"
To yours!
As Voltaire said, 'We must cultivate our garden.' You're returning to tend your own, aren't you?
I replied unflinchingly in my halting fourth-term French, "Mon jardin est envahi par des attentes familiales." I paused, mangling the next line. "Je ne sais pas encore quelles fleurs y planter."
My garden is overrun with family expectations.
I don't yet know what flowers to plant there.
As the plane turned west and headed for America, we spoke in dreadfully reductive but poetically incisive French, laughing harder with every round of Champagne.
We hugged each other goodbye. She rushed to catch her connection, and I spilled into a taxi, drunk and jetlagged—already half-lost, but on my way…home?
An hour later, the driver was wrangling the familiar loop of traffic on I-285 before finally swiveling off the perimeter. I felt the ease of familiar surroundings as the concrete slowly receded, giving way to long, verdant avenues lined with dogwoods.
Sitting up from my slouch of meandering worries, I rolled down the window as the taxi picked up speed and curved toward the suburbs north of Atlanta.
The fading smells of spring drifted into the cab on the back of the heavy southern humidity. I leaned into the familiar muggy yet fragrant embrace of azaleas as the wind turned to wave in puffs of goodbye to the slowly receding sun.
But the sweetness felt weirdly foreign—a poetic language I no longer spoke. Disheartened by this perception, I slouched down into the backseat of the taxi, sucked in by its worn and sun-cracked upholstery, as if instinctively trying to escape. As we drove I peered outside the window, bored by much of what I saw.
Real estate agents smiling with impossible joy from billboards, as dinged-up cars darted around the traffic. Giving up on the febrile air conditioner, I rolled down the dusty window as my body began to sweat. The taxi satisfied to rumble in the heat.
I was perturbed that I had to return unwillingly—angry that I hadn't devised some way to stay.
As the rolling hills of the suburbs began to rise around me, I felt a shift in the wind untether me from any sense that I was returning to where I belonged. I felt uneasy, disquieted by my entrance into the land of convenient plenty. It was despair—the futile acknowledgment that there were no rambling alleys to explore. I was stepping into a scene from an American drama that hummed with a lack of inquiry, dulled behind a colonial facade, an easy mask of unquestioned comfort.
The familiar sounds of summer wove around me in peaceful splendor. Lawn mowers grumbled across manicured lawns. Sprinklers whispered over waxy grass.
As we drew closer to my parents' latest house, I glanced out at the weaving landscape. It was dotted with bright new homes that varied only slightly in numbingly similar construction. Flags hung in repetitive agreement. It was peaceful, leafy—and boring. The fear of imprisonment in a world of unending regularity made my heart ache for something mindblowingly unexpected to go spectacularly awry.
Finally arriving, I paid the driver—drawing the sharply crisp, unfamiliar bills from my pocket and pressing them into his hand without looking.
I had never lived in the house, which perched precariously atop a steep hill, its pale navy facade trimmed with white classical molding. I stared up at it, unsure what to call it. I had no affection for the place. It was just another house where they had begun again, one of many in a string of failed attempts.
It stared back, light pouring from its elongated windows as if eyeing a stranger, uncertain who I was or why I had come.
I knocked. The door opened to pent-up emotion. Smiles and kisses swapped turns all around.
Muffy, my mother's Skye Terrier, hovered behind her, growling in wary confusion. As I leaned down to pet her, she smothered my face in a slurry of licking, her tail thudding against the doorframe in sudden, fond recognition.
After a few warm yet rushed words of arrival, I trundled up the stairs into a scented and stuffy guest room. I stowed my bags and turned—catching my reflection in an absurdly elaborate gold mirror.
It offered no sympathy–only a stark apparition. The ghost of a grimy traveler hung in silvery suspension. I was weary and wan–unmistakably lost.
The final two days in London had blurred into drunken diversion. The champagne had fizzled into a sticky hangover that clung to my skin. Grit and grime etched my face with a telling admission.
I had disconnected from place and time, suspended in the disruption of leaving and coming. I was neither here nor anywhere else I had already been. I was still traveling, but on a thin rail of perceptions. The sights and sounds around me reverberated into widening questions: Where was I going? When had I left?
My mother's voice floated up from below, pulling me back into the moment. I needed to clean up before joining the family for dinner.
I stripped off the stinking remnants of Camden and dropped them into the trash. Then I stepped into the powerful stream of the American shower, letting it strip the grit and grime of London off of my skin.
Bowing my head to wash my Kensington haircut, I noticed a tiny shard of glass from the Embankment caught spinning helpless against the drain. I plucked the victim free as I stepped into my overdone new bedroom.
Standing naked before the mirror, I held the shard between my fingers, showing it what I had found. I set it down on the dresser, pulling on a new set of American clothes.
My parents had recently moved to their new house to be near my father's twin brother and his wife. We drove over for dinner, passing through gates and down a winding road bordered by hedges to their well-ordered home. It sat in immaculate unpretension beside a softly hushing fairway where my uncle spent his time.
Though the scene was newly gated, nothing else had truly changed. The familiar humorous jocularity between brothers continued, ensuring life proceeded as expected, as it had and always would.
There were challenges, of course—but they were mainly those of quiet expectation. Dinners were filled with the clink of glasses and the light of candles that reflected off the ancient silver cutlery. Bright talk about what was next flowed softly in southern cadence—the hum of evening crickets slipping in from beyond the open door.
Though the unspoken topic was curiosity about my future plans, it was addressed in the obliquely subversive way that our family routinely joked.
Stoking the conversation with wry puns, my uncle started us off by declaring that I should "Do something serious for a change."
My father responded by proudly noting that my real strength was that I was not "overly cautious." The room began to giggle.
My mother, as always, was enthusiastically dramatic:
"He can be anything that he sets himself to..." her pearls swinging in effusive agreement—"…though in my heart I know he is a writer and that comes with its own share of sorrow."
My aunt, a well-studied Southern Belle, summed up her perspective with elegant inflection, stating that she had no doubt that:
"I would be good at doing whatever I wanted."
She paused, turned to look at me with her beautifully twinkling eyes, and concluded,
"…as he has done since he came into this world kicking, screaming, and crying."
The room erupted in puttering laughter, everyone assuming with certainty that there must already be a plan. The American inclination to gaze jocularly forward with unwavering optimism jarred against the faltering flame I carried inside.
Instead of smiling back, I began to mourn—not with anger, but in quiet remorse. The boy they remembered no longer existed. I had abandoned myself—all they imagined me to be. And I didn't have the heart to show them the stranger I had become.
My mother remained silent. Her sea-green eyes — the same as mine — flickered through the candlelight. Then her lips pursed, sending a quiet kiss across the table. A tacit admission that she understood what it meant to belong with me. I hesitated before blurting out the truth—stuttering slightly through my newly mangled accent, I announced that I'd hit "quite a sticky wicket."
You couldn't quite see it on their faces, but heads tilted slightly, the air tugging them sideways. The room pulsed in awkward silence.
I smiled weakly, struggling to catch the thread.
"Actually, I'm quite hard at it — becoming a chimney sweep. Trades get all the work—family rates, of course! Chimney chim!"
I danced a loose jig with an imaginary broom, tipping my invisible cap. The room lit up with laughter. The evening slipped back into comfortable ease, the candles melting into soft pools that faded into memory.
V 06-26-25