Growing up in the US, I barely knew my family on the other side of the Atlantic. In my mind, my Uncle Brian was more of a name than a person, and I had only met him a handful of times.
Two of those meetings were before I was old enough to remember, and the other two were when I was an angsty high school teenager with not much interest in getting to know someone more than twice my age.
It wasn’t until 2014, when I traveled to London for the summer to explore my ancestral home, that I connected with my uncle.
Preparing for what I imagined to be a cordial, potentially awkward meet-up, I didn’t expect much in the way of connection. He was, essentially, a stranger.
I never expected our relationship to blossom that summer
We met outside a café, and he took me into central London to one of his favorite pubs. When I ordered a pint of London Pride, he looked confused.
“You like London Pride?” he asked me. We chatted over his shock at what he said was my pleasantly un-American good taste in British beer.
That summer, we spent many days together exploring pubs, strolling through museums and parks, and seeing musicals on the West End. Experiencing London through his eyes was incredible, but what stands out to me most is how little time it took to develop such a close relationship.
I had spent most of my life barely knowing him, yet somehow, that distance and those missed years disappeared. When we were together, I didn’t see an age difference. I just saw my friend.
I had always felt like something of an outlier growing up, restless in a way I didn’t see reflected in the rest of my family. Getting close to Uncle Brian felt less like meeting someone new and more like being handed a mirror.
My Nanny, his sister, says he and I are cut from the same cloth. We both have itchy feet, she says, and are always searching for our next destination. There’s something oddly reassuring about discovering that the part of me I had always thought made me different existed in someone else, too.
I remember being particularly nervous about coming out to him. After all, he is from a generation I worried might struggle with it. Instead, without missing a beat, he simply said, “So what? Do you want another drink?”
I’ll never forget that moment.
Now that we live in the same city, we’re making up for lost time.
When I left London, we stayed in touch mostly through text, and when I moved to Los Angeles, the eight-hour time difference made those messages even more important.
I visited him a few times over the years, picking up right where we left off, and always ending with a very tearful goodbye.
But when I decided to move to London in the summer of 2025, knowing he was here made it much easier.
Moving to a new country, looking for work, and trying to build a new life was still daunting, but I didn’t feel like I was completely starting over. I had someone here I could turn to when things felt uncertain.
These days, I see him a few times a month. We still meet in our favorite pub, go on nights out to the theater, and chat and laugh for hours.
We love to gossip, and I fill him in on family back home. He tells me stories about his past, and repeatedly reminds me about the time when I was 4 years old and he sat me on top of one of the lions in Trafalgar Square.
Other times, our conversations become quite deep, and we find ourselves discussing everything from relationships to the choices we’ve made and what we’ve learned. And sometimes, we touch on harder topics like how we want to make the most of the time we have left together.
We’re there for one another, as best friends are. I can rely on him, and he on me.
I used to assume that the people who knew me best would be the ones who had known me the longest. Uncle Brian has made me question that.
I understand now that knowing someone isn’t always about the years you’ve shared with them. Sometimes, you meet someone and recognize yourself almost immediately.
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