a yung pilgrim in London

I say it often, to myself and my friends: wherever you go, there you are. I mean it in the way that your damage is you, your choices follow you from within, and a new place cannot heal an open wound. London, whose cobblestoned streets I traversed in my mother's red Hunter wellies, did not challenge this platitude in the two summer months I lived there. I arrived sad and left the same. But wasn't it a wondrous, different place to feel the same things, and pursue the same distractions?

When I think of the trip, I overflow with vivid, gorgeous moments: summer gardens bursting with roses. Neon lights and thumping bass in Tiger Tiger, the taste of espresso and tequila on my tongue. Hand-carved wooden chapel walls bedecked in tapestries. The crimson syrup at the tapered bottom of my first Kir Royale. Stained glass windows filled with saints and weeping women. The joyful jumble of Hamleys, Liberty, Harrods, Primark, Camden Market. Delicate ceramics arranged in the Victoria and Albert Museum. The long, flat lawns of country estates and their charming villages downriver.

But now, scrolling through the spare hundred photos I took, I see: There I went, there I was. Surrounded by beauty and culture, I took the piss.

Ostensibly, twelve of us arrived in June to read Dickens and follow the ghost of William Morris across the English countryside. We haunted the British Museum, played cricket in the Cotswolds, and debated the roles of women and orphans and Kings. Particulars escape me now. What happened in David Copperfield, you ask? Well, all I remember is the pub we frequented, just across the street from our flat, was named the Betsey Trotwood, and she had something to do with it all, didn't she? A cozy crew on our first night, we found the name funny and synchronistic. We toasted the omen with bizarrely warm pints of beer before retreating to our flat and cracking open cold, canned, lemonade-mixed novelties.

What a crew, what a flat. We shared four bedrooms and two bathrooms in a Clerkenwell penthouse, hardly minding the squeeze. Half the apartment was a window-wall with a long, flat view of London's sprawl. At dusk, the view lost its smudgy, gray distance, darkness sharpening a skyline into glimmering towers and landmarks. There was a thin strip of balcony beyond the glass, but no door to reach it.

Three nights a week, the rooftop across the street became a stage for aerial performances. We stood with our noses pressed against the window-wall to watch until the bravest of us punched out a screen and wriggled his way through the pane's tilted opening. We all followed suit, laughing nervously at the steel frame's pinch, to wave at the swirling women draped in silk, bracketed by sky.

And the picture I chose to take? A midnight selfie from the building's elevator, trapped for fifteen minutes with two friends and the stench of our post-fish-dinner trash seeping through the bag.

It's a theme, you see. In London, I experienced moments worthy of transformation, treasures of highbrow pleasures that could have opened me like a flower. I might have drunk from them and felt differently about myself and my world, but instead, I let them wash over me like warm bathwater and toweled off -- unchanged but for the pruning of my fingers, which faded in time, too. I focused on my small miseries and discovered fragments of irony, craving to be made interesting rather than improved.

Like when I took a friend to high tea and experienced the joy of a warm, proper scone, smothered in clotted cream and raspberry jam, for the first time. I, a girl studying art history who would become a pastry chef, sat in the sunlit atrium of the British Museum with magic melting in my mouth, and only took a photo of spilled milk.

Or again in the British Museum for class, when I read Keats' Ode on a Grecian Urn aloud before the Elgin Marbles and felt a twist of understanding ripple through me: art unlocked by word, made beautiful, word imparted meaning by art, made tangible. When old age shall this generation waste, thou shalt remain, I read with trembling voice, pointing at the urn in question. Tourists milling about the room stopped to listen. They clapped at the close of my performance. I wiped tears from my eyes.

And took no pictures, until I saw the fly perched like a signet ring atop the dangling hand of a marble statue's pudenda.

But of course, there is a parade of blurry selfies: Drunk on the tube. Tongue out in the club. Squinting in the sun. Gesticulating rudely under the sign of a takeaway called "Bone Daddies." Tits out. Bottoms up. There I am, there I am, there I am, caught up in grainy pixels, frozen forever in a pique of mordancy.

And where are all the crisp, shining moments I loved best, those I would love to revisit? The glory of a lamb burger, dripping with grease, eaten on the bank of the Thames. When a thunderstorm swept over us as we explored Kelmscott Manor, purpling the sky like a bruise, knocking petals of fully bloomed roses to the manicured lawn. Running through a rainbow maze at the Serpentine, laughing over my shoulder as my most beloved summer fling chased me.

Those, I suppose, I kept for myself. For, though I took no pictures for posterity, I remember them still, and more dearly than anything I interrupted by reaching for my phone. I hoarded those flawless memories like little planted seeds, waiting for the terroir of my mind to mature and recognize them as superior. That work is done. They unfurl within me still.

And also still growing within me, a new appreciation for opportunities lost, for moments I may have captured but did not. In this past week's hunt for photos, I found just one taken from a perfect moment. The summer fling and I picnicked on Hampstead Heath, eating ripe strawberries the size of peanuts, watching other lovers dally in the grass, and looking for shapes and symbols in the long stretch of clouds above us.

I was struck, quite suddenly, how all the clouds looked just like clouds -- but not as I had understood them, rather in the way that Constable and Turner understood them. How they built and rolled and broiled, how they lazed and hurried, how no banal, American cloud could hold a candle.

I took a panoramic photo. Upon my return to the States, I cropped the photo to fit my computer background, then plastered it with screenshots and folders and widget notes until it disappeared. And now, for the first time in nine years, I open the original file and find a surprise: his face in the right-most edge, a glitch in the scroll, smiling at my joke through all those years gone by. The only picture I have of him that's mine.