Travel Essay Five: The Best Place to Cry in London
When I was a freshman at Eckerd, I had a terrible roommate. Well, it wasn’t so much that she was terrible as it was that her boyfriend was terrible. He lived back home in New Hampshire, and it was clear she wanted to be with him rather than at Eckerd. She would FaceTime him almost every night, often without headphones, forcing me to listen to his constant use of racist and homophobic slurs and the casual sexist abuse he directed at her. He was controlling, too; he didn’t like her going out to parties and often told her not to wear anything too “slutty.” I did a lot of crying that year, mostly because I was very mentally ill and an unconfident, non-confrontational stranger in a brand new place. I never had the spine to tell either of them to fuck off, and it made me feel powerless and miserable. And I was too afraid of confrontation to even allow myself to cry in the room, so I almost always went outside and sat on the curb when I needed to have a good pity party. It was one such night, with me sitting despondent and hopeless outside Kappa Scott, that someone noticed me crying. They were a total stranger, and I’m sure I looked pathetic: Scooby-Doo pajamas and an oversized t-shirt and sleep-messy hair. But they ignored all that, crouched next to me, and asked me with complete sincerity if I was okay. If you think about it, that’s sort of a ridiculous thing to ask, because stable people don’t tend to sit outside in their jammies sobbing at 11:30 at night. But it was really more about the gesture. The fact that someone I’d never met would take the time to let me know they saw me and were concerned about me — something my anxious ass would never consider in a thousand years — meant the universe to me. Of course, I lied and said I was fine, which is equally ridiculous. But again, it’s about the gesture. And over the years, that memory alone has made it hard to chime in when people around me complain about Eckerd. Fade in, years later, on the corner of Goodge Street and Tottenham Court Road. Different city, same shit: after a gnarly fight with my best friend, I was huddled on the sidewalk against the brick wall of Le Pain Quotidien and just really letting loose. The bathroom would’ve been preferable, but the door required some kind of code to open it, and I’m still afraid of talking to people. So I let myself break down on a public street. I figured it wasn’t the weirdest thing Londoners had ever seen on their evening walk, and I seemed to be right; almost everyone was passing by me with barely a glance. So I put my head in my hands and resigned myself to riding it out. That is, until I heard a soft, heavily Italian-accented voice come from next to me. “Do you cry for a man?” asked a woman who was crouching next to me. Her friend looked on, concerned. Both were slender and beautiful, with long dark hair, wearing high heels and black stockings and thick, expensive overcoats. I gave her a watery laugh and shook my head. “No, nothing like that.” She didn’t seem to understand me, though, and she continued. “Listen. You never cry for a man. Men are shit. You do not let them make you feel this way. You are worth so much more than them.” Her friend nodded and said something in Italian. I laughed again at the sheer absurdity of the situation, of these two strange Italian women telling an American lesbian not to cry over a man, and the woman next to me smiled. “It is good to see you laugh and smile,” she said. “I am glad I could make you laugh.” Pretty soon, we were all standing against the wall, and the Italian women were smoking cigarettes and asking me about restaurants and trying earnestly to find the English words they were looking for, and I kept laughing. “It is good to see you laugh,” the English-speaking woman kept telling me. Before we parted ways, she insisted we trade phones and follow each other on Instagram. Later that night, an Instagram notification popped up: a direct message. I checked it. It was the Italian woman. in these months I have suffered so much for a man, she wrote, and when I was about to die I realized that I am more important. it's the same for you, you do not have to cry, you have to cry because he lost you I decided not to explain. It was about the gesture. I wrote back: Thank you so much for checking in on me tonight and making me smile. It was so kind of you, and I really needed that kindness. ❤️ She responded: you see that you are a good soul and you deserve it ❤️ We haven’t spoken to each other since then, and we probably never will again. I haven’t, to my knowledge, spoken to the person who comforted me that night three years ago. But I’m perfectly okay with that, because all I needed – all it took – was that one meeting. Growing up is realizing that the world is a lot meaner than you thought, but it’s also a lot nicer than you expected. And in a monsoon of Trump tweets and alt-right reactionaries and border walls and government shutdowns, sometimes all you need is a lively, confident, and slightly confused Italian woman to ask you how you’re doing.
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