A few minutes ago, I was struck out of the blue by a vivid recollection. For some reason, a block of central London reformed around me, here in my house, conjured out of my memory of London from ten months ago. I don’t know why it came to me, but there it was, a stretch of Londontown just south of the Thames, just up the stairs from the Borough Market, from just before I shot this ambient memento:

Borough Market Moment from Wordwill on Vimeo.

This being the future, though, I can reminisce without having to dive into my own vacation photos (few of which were taken during our walks to and from places, really, anyway). Instead, I go to Google and tap into our collection information network for whatever Google maps tells me is the mass collective memory of Borough High Street. Click, click, there it is—the building with the name that had slipped off the edge of my memory and was dangling, just out of sight, by the letter B. It was the Barrowboy and Bank, an empty pub (or perhaps outright restaurant) near the London Bridge tube stop, whose name may have struck me at the time because of the Decemberists’s song.

Sara and I crossed at that pedestrian crossing and walked past the pub there toward the stairs behind the photographer in this shot. We’d just stepped up out of the tube, and this was probably the closest I’ve ever been to London Bridge (for some reason, I’ve never gotten to it), and we were just about to visit the much-praised public market beneath the rails there. Maybe it was the anticipation that made this memory stick — the oily smell of street food and the gurgle of an espresso machine came up through the crowd below, as I remember it — but I don’t know what it was that brought this one stretch of pavement out of my mind this morning.

But I’m making use of it. I’m writing down the details that waft up with this memory — the jet-lag dizziness and the cheek-reddening chill on my face, the pale glimpse through the Barrowboy’s windows into a building I’ll probably never enter, the ache in my pores of London air, of being so close to so much, and the twist in my insides that said “Live here! Live here!” and felt very truly like hunger — in the hopes that I can use them later in some bit of writing. In the hopes that I can hope to return.

Noise: Telefon Tel Aviv, “Mostly Translucent”