Navigating My Nervous Breakdown One London Street View at a Time
Sometimes I feel like Miss Havisham in a flight attendant uniform. I may inhabit the 43-year-old body of a Tucson mom—complete with unfashionable bob and part-time work-from-home business—but I’m still haunted by the 24-year-old London-based flygirl I used to be.
Unlike Miss Havisham, I don’t actually wear the old United uniform that’s hanging in my closet. I’m not that far gone, but she didn’t have the Internet and couldn’t stalk her youth by Google cam.
I drop my pin outside Lambeth North tube stop. I can practically hear the whoosh of the train arriving into the arched tunnel, the sound of my boots on the tile floor as I climb the spiral staircase and exit to the thousand-year-old borough of Lambeth.
This working-class sliver of “Sowf” London was a dreamy place to live, even if it was already a bit worn around the edges back then. It was wildly convenient—just across the Thames from Big Ben, Trafalgar Square, the bookstores of Charing Cross Road. It was a short walk to the Royal Albert Symphony Hall and the London Eye, but without a tourist in sight. At the time, it was also one of the most affordable sections of Central London.
Back then, I was twenty-four and living for the moment, crisscrossing the globe at a clip of 30,000 miles a month. My passport was fat with 48 added pages and a cover so worn you could barely make out the words “United States of America.”
Google-cam shows me what looks like a typical day with scattered clouds and people wearing light jackets. I can almost feel the crisp air on my parched Arizona skin. I should be there too, dragging my rollaboard suitcase through my past, desperately trying to be that woman again, if only for a few days.
A few months ago, I had booked a bargain flight for a long weekend when my pilot husband could actually be home with the kids. I convinced myself that a quick whiff of freedom would be enough to sustain me, and I couldn’t wait to get on the same 777 I used to work, back when flying was carefree and loved ones could meet you at the gate.
If I could taste just a morsel of that life again, I would bring it back home, stop my sulking, and everyone could be happy.
But my flight canceled, and the world went on lockdown, so I sit at my kitchen table 5 a.m. soaking in the predawn hours before my household wakes and another day of improvised homeschool begins.
I spin the pegman toward the familiar gothic revival spire of the Lincoln Memorial; the 22-story block of luxury flats that was being built the last time I saw it; the site of the Chinese restaurant whose owner would always slip me a few free wontons or fortune cookies. It’s now an upscale gastropub.
There’s also a new-to-me Costa Coffee on the opposite corner, which would have been manna from heaven before an early morning flight. I imagine walking in there and ordering an espresso. Despite my accent, the barista would mistake me for a local. I’d laugh and ask her about the neighborhood’s new look. After a nice chat, I’d sit down at a table and scan Time Out to see what’s on.
Across Westminster Bridge Road is the Park Plaza, where I should be staying. Instead of the busted-out windows and rude graffiti of the past, it’s sporting a new brick facade and neon blue porte-cochere.
“If tragedy hadn’t struck, would I have stayed forever?”
Directly across from it is my old building, the place I went home to after transatlantic redeyes, good dates and bad, day trips to Paris. The place where my aviation-loving flatmates and I would eagerly watch at least one of the Concorde’s thrice-daily flyovers.
The building is hidden under a web of scaffolding, but underneath it’s the same historic wall of red brick and narrow awning windows, topped by rows of chimneys that make up a quintessential London street scene. I wonder what changes the scaffolding portends.
What would have become of me if I hadn’t had to leave so suddenly? If tragedy hadn’t struck, would I have stayed forever?
My husband’s timed coffee maker starts brewing. The sun is starting to come up and the kids will be up soon, too.
This suburban housewife thing, it happened by accident. I married a pilot and imagined a life of adventure. That may have been naïve, but certainly neither of us intended to get stuck in such traditional gender roles. Only, when one person is always on the road, someone has to be home with the kids.
Even when she’d rather be in London.
The Red Lion—where I tried my first pint of Guinness and discovered I like Newcastle better—has been replaced by a hostel. Rajdoot, the mom-and-pop where I fell in love with Indian food, is now a glass-enclosed office block. Two more coffee shops have sprouted up. There’s also a Sainsbury’s Local, a convenience-sized version of the nation’s second-largest grocery chain. I worry for the Pakistani corner shop I stopped by nearly every day. How long will they be able to compete with that?
I’m hit by an absurd pang of grief at the tangible evidence of the most obvious thing in the world—that even if I can eventually make my trip a reality, I can’t go back.
My daughter comes running into the kitchen in her pink Disney princess nightgown with her hair wild around her head. I close my computer and pull her onto my lap. As I hold her and smell the raspberry scent of her “Elsa and Anna” shampoo, I think about the weekends I spent playing house with my then-boyfriend, Miles, helping him paint and renovate his flat in the Docklands. I knew this adorable but perpetually drunk Scot wasn’t the right man, but I remember yearning for the home and family I didn’t know if I’d ever have.
When I look back at that time, I never think of that uneasiness. Like a lover in the early stages of infatuation, I only see the version of me that I want to see.
I remind myself to be happy with where I landed, that I truly don’t wish I was coming home from clubs at 4 a.m., or spending 15 nights a month in 15 different hotels, waking up and checking the stationery to remember where I am.
I spend the morning toasting Eggo waffles, reading aloud to my kindergartner and crawling on the floor with a tape measure to help my second grader calculate the area of each room in our house.
I try not to think of that September day when Miles called.
“A United flight’s been hijacked,” he said.
“Yeah, right.”
“Darlin’ I’m not kidding.”
Twenty flight attendants met at a flat in Earl’s Court. We saw what the rest of the world saw, but it was our colleagues who had already been murdered with box cutters. That 767, with the iconic red and blue U on its gray fuselage, wasn’t just an airplane to us. It was our entire lives, our identities.
We got furloughed, our work visas were voided, and we abruptly scattered to the various places we’d come from.
Eventually, we rebuilt our lives with grad school and medical school, careers from finance to fashion. But in my mind, our neighborhood, our old life, has stayed frozen in time.
After lunch, while my kids are engaged in Sustained Silent Reading, I eagerly pull up Google maps and head back to where I left off, taking in all the changes—the fashionable new gastropubs, the organic tea house and the organic beauty store, the gym that GQ recently lauded for its hot-temp yoga and interval training, so many hostels and hotels, including one that offers free electric guitars and plug-in amp “for a jam session.”
I roll my eyes. From 5,000 miles away, I can’t tell if the neighborhood’s changes would be classified as blood-sucking gentrification or much-needed revitalization. Is anything about this area authentic anymore?
Is anything about me? Clearly being responsible for two young lives is as real as it gets. What I’m faking is that this domesticated life is enough for me.
I start to accept what I already knew—my problem runs deeper than anything a weekend anywhere can fix.
The issue isn’t that I’m no longer who I once was. It’s that I’m not who I want to be now. Worse, I can’t even visualize that woman.
But maybe rather than thwarting my chance for that brief escape, this pandemic is reminding me, once again, that we can wholly reconstruct our lives when we need to.
I can’t keep pretending I don’t need to.
I’m not going to run off and live in Paris, forsaking my children like the reviled mother of a popular sitcom I grew up watching, but could there be some middle ground?
The one thing I know is that another life-altering shift is coming. Only this time, I will instigate it.
Tiffany Hawk is the author of Love Me Anyway, a novel about coming-of-age at 35,000 feet, and the Editorial Director of Undomesticated.