wandering on google maps: the pixels between myself and ‘home’
‘Cause we are living in a pixelated world, and I am a pixelated girl.
The act of wandering is at best therapeutic and at worst monotonous. At the best of times, wandering can give way to a dreamlike state in which the mind unknots choruses of confused thoughts with each step, allowing the body to proceed in autopilot. At its worst, wandering is merely a tiresome encumbrance, infringing on the space between where you are now and where you want to be.
Just like most other things, wandering doesn’t necessarily stop in the physical realm - it extends, sprawls out across the four corners of our screens. With the use of Google Maps, I can find myself within seconds absent-mindedly scrolling, pulling, shifting my 2D peripheral vision to wherever I desire. But what happens when highly sensory experiences, such as those we encounter when wandering (shared eye contact, facial expressions, tripping over shoelaces) are flattened, compressed into mere pixels? What happens when we can move forwards and backwards, yet are nothing but a bodiless entity?
When the experience of wandering via Google Maps is broken down only to its optics - what our surroundings look like - we become all but a removed observer, our gaze one-sided and limited by the dimensions of our screens. We can look beside us only in predefined, rigid motions, thereby rendering our overall experience a static one: we pass strangers captured in conversations that we cannot overhear, glide seamlessly through busy traffic without the anxiety-inducing sounds of cars beeping, we see the way a street looks during a downpour, but we do not feel the rain. Our sense of self is reduced, shed down to the bare megapixels that only make up the mere fragments of a reality. Wandering in the digital sense removes us from both others and ourselves.
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Wandering my way through Paris is a daily habit that, Lord knows how, I have been consistent with since the beginning of 2021 (even if this ‘wandering’ is sometimes only a meagre walk to the local McDonald’s and back). This very real and physical wandering allows me precious space to walk alongside my thoughts, to witness them clumsily unravelling, spilling over to emotions that merge into thoughts again.
However, as time went on, these thoughts began to circle around the same question: ‘Where do I want to be?’
The problem is that, in a world of lockdowns, curfews and restricted travel, the answer to ‘Where do I want to be?’ had no option other than to be: wherever I am now.
Except I didn’t want to be where I was, am, now.
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As the prospect of being able to visit ‘home’ had been made largely complicated, wandering via Google Maps slowly became a sort of therapy. I would tap ‘London’ into the search bar, zoom around, find an interesting street name, and try to remember what the air somewhere other than where I currently am feels like.
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May. Restrictions begin to ease in both Paris and London. I feel a visceral sense of lack. Deprived of community, purpose, and belonging, I soon started craving an ‘elsewhere’ to the point where I was wandering around Paris, but wondering about London. Inevitably, this created friction with where I found myself and where I wanted to be. This friction was the exact same catalyst I had 3 years ago which led me to flee London and find solace in Paris.
But with too much friction comes fire, and over time I noticed myself becoming increasingly hostile and bitter about my current environment. Everything became/is the fault of Paris, and wandering no longer gave me headroom or helped to invoke a dreamlike state. Rather, everything, from the way people would push me out of the way in Lidl queues to the motorbikes that would run red lights, became taunting cues for me to leave. The city was, is, smothering me.
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How do you put out such a fire?
Option 1) Make peace with knowing that you will always be wherever you are, and that a change of location is not the panacea to life’s stressors and pains that you make it out to be.
Option 2) Run away and convince yourself that things will only be better in [Other Place].
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For over a year now, I have constantly oscillated between Option 1 and 2. While I knew that I wasn’t happy in Paris, I was equally scared that moving back would make me even more unhappy. After all, there was a reason I left in the first place. Plus, with the logistics of Brexit, whatever I did felt final. However, I could no longer deny just how miserable life felt in a city which, to me; as a sensitive, over-polite, bordering pushover, Brit, is often brusque and thankless.
Every abrasive encounter with the city and its inhabitants was causing me to retreat further inwards, with many nights spent hunched over reading ‘The Lonely City’ instead of being outside, where my body felt too clunky and exposed. So, I went bodiless, and continued to wander around London via Google Maps, desperately trying to gage how I might feel on those familiar streets, under overcast skies, when I cannot be an ocean away (a relatively small one at that, but still) from all that I originally fled from. But just as wandering digitally is not as sensorial as wandering physically, wandering in the digital realm could no longer satiate my longing for home.
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July. I choose Option 2.
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I crave community, I crave universally meaningless but individually significant small talk with cashiers, I crave orderly queues, I crave tutting when one breaks the unsaid rules of such queues, I crave the stuttering dance of ‘sorry’s’ with strangers as we both try to pass one another on the pavement, I crave the East London accent, I crave afternoons spent cooking awful carbonara spaghetti (made from eggs that have been left out for weeks) with my best friend, I crave the sound of the kettle boiling, I crave the feeling of possibility. Most of all, after what has been a year of [TW] UNPRECEDENTED unfamiliarity, I crave the novelty of familiarity.
Whether going home actually helps to rectify this feeling of ‘longing,’ or rather worsens the problem, unveiling to me that in fact my idea of ‘home’ was only based on a romanticised notion of England as a result from listening to too much 2000s Britpop, is something only time will tell. However, if you can live a life in accordance with your values, then I believe that you will (mostly) find some sense of contentment. And if there’s one thing living in Paris has taught me, it’s that I value GOOD OL’ BRITISH MANNERS. And my friends and family, of course...
But, being realistic here, while this one-way ticket might temporarily get me out of Longing Land, the problem is that longing has no final destination. It travels as long as you allow it to.
The melancholic feelings induced by dreaming about an artificial ‘elsewhere,’ can become addictive, meaning that once no longer deprived of ‘elsewhere,’ you will soon try to find another object of desire that you are being deprived of, longing for [New Thing] as a means to distract you from facing things that, often urgently, need to be faced. So, in typical hedonic treadmill fashion, perhaps it will only be a matter of time before life back in London leaves me longing for Paris. Perhaps I’ll even find myself wandering the streets of Paris on Google Maps. Or perhaps I will instead long for another city, another version of myself. Or maybe I'll just start longing for... longing. Or longing for the longing of longing.
Or, if all goes well, perhaps I won't long for any place other than where I currently am. Even if that ‘currently’ might look like being pressed against sweaty strangers in the bellowing stomach of the Central Line, because outside, despite the fact that it’s August, it most probably, will be raining. But hey, at least the man who squeezes past me on the underground will say ‘sorry.’ At least I hope so. Or else I might start daydreaming about Paris...
*Closes Google Maps…
For now.*
Reading this after having the same experience wow, before lock down I actually moved to New Zealand we had no Covid and it was so exciting but then I had to come back, my visa running out and my uni waiting for me, however I moved back to France - stuck in my parents attic waiting to go back to London or maybe waiting/hibernating in the attic until…idk…until something? Whatever you do! You’ll be great and you’re writing really hit home 💕 take care !!
I moved out of my home country alone when I was 15 because I just didn’t vibe with it and craved a different kind of life, then after 10 years in this country, well I got tired of it too and at 25 I ended up in… well, Paris ! Your post was particularly enjoyable for me because I’ve always dreamed of living in London. Since my childhood in my home country, I grew up obsessing over everything British. I’ve visited several times and done solo trips all over England (yes, even the very north and the very middle) to live my childhood dream, but I never managed to actually find a way to live there, and now I’ve somehow ended up in Paris. Reading this gave me nostalgic homesickness for a place that’s not even my home 🥺 Would be lovely to connect with you before you leave Paris ! :)