"You know what's weird? Day by day, nothing seems to change, but pretty soon...everything's different." -Bill Watterson

When I was a junior in college, I studied abroad in London. You know the story: girl flies across the Atlantic, takes photos of monuments, kisses an English boy, finds self. In reality, my story went more like: girl flies across the Atlantic, cries of homesickness, meets group of awesome guys to tag along with, travels around Europe, kisses an English boy, always had her self hiding within.

I'll save you the juicy part of the story where I break up with a long-term boyfriend, write long, soul-searching letters to my parents and keep a journal that can only be described as horrifyingly earnest and tell you this: I spent 6 months living in a dingy high-rise on the South side of London,  When I returned to the US, it was with confidence, worldliness and a smoking habit I had picked up in hopes that it would get a guy to like me (hey, self-discovery is a long process).

Save for a brief 24-hour layover a year later, I had never been back to London until a few weeks ago, when I made a special trip for my friend's wedding. For the most part, it was like seeing an old friend: you pick up where you left off and fill in the missing pieces as you go. I was surprised at how innately some things came back to me (here's the path I walked to get to my tube station) and how much of my mental map had warped over the years (oh, maybe it's more than a 10 minute walk. Or a 30 minute walk. sorry). "Look at me!" I thought, "I'm walking hand-in-hand with a man through the streets of London, kissing on street corners like the cosmopolitan world traveler/romantic that I am!"

And then we were back at my flat. Still dingy. Still somehow standing. We snapped some pics and went across the street to the pub where I spent many a night trying not to calculate the cost of my beer into US dollars and sharing plates of greasy chips with the boys.

"Oh, look! Free WiFi!" my manfriend said, and as we both checked in on Foursquare and flipped through our e-mails I took an involuntary mental time-travel back to my study abroad days. It was 2004. I had an iBook, a Sony Cybershot 3.2 megapixel camera and a Sony Discman. After a few weeks I splurged on a pay-as-you-go cell phone to keep in touch with my London friends, and was vigilant about managing my minutes and SMS messages. There was no wifi, no internet connection at all in our building. Writing an email meant getting on the train, riding to school and waiting my turn in a computer lab. I was, for the first time in my young adult life, actually on my own for the first time. I may have left with close friends and happy memories, but I arrived with nothing but my own wits and a passport (literally, because my luggage got lost).

I started that trip anxiously checking my mailbox for letters from my boyfriend, my mother, my friends from college, staring out the window like Fievel Mouskewitz wondering if they were indeed sleeping underneath the same big moon (fact: the 6 hour time difference nearly always meant that no, we were not sleeping at the same time). And as it nearly always is, the pain was worth it. That lung-crushing homesickness, the rock I felt in my throat when my phone card finally worked and I heard my parents on the other end of the line, the tears I cried while walking alone through a maze of unfamiliar streets, those were all a part of the lesson I needed to leave our country to learn.

And so there I was, back in a new version of the same place, as a new version of my same self in a new chapter of my same life. 21-year-old Nora couldn't have seen this coming any more than she could have imagined that her mother would someday be on Facebook. 

By this time the manfriend had picked up on my zone-out and was tapping on the table in front of me. "This place is important to me," I tried to explain, "because it taught me how to be alone."

by Nora McInerny