I arrived in the city not brand new but different. Earlier that year I had not stopped moving, contorting my body into shapes that had names I couldn’t pronounce and finding peace in the thrashing waves but also in small cigarettes purchased for a few rupees at the local shop and high up on the 16th floor of a downtown hotel and not in him or even the absence of him. A year held in suspense, a gear shift stall, a protective pause before real life crept in and I was forced to face up to the bulk of me instead of hide behind it like it wasn’t stopping me from living.
The summer before the city was an attempt to return to something familiar. I had come back from a year living outside the lines and resumed what I knew: the shed, a job waitressing and cooking on wood fire, and the embers of a burnt out relationship. I performed the usual rituals: stable doors flung open, coffee on the hob, dishes done outside, a drive to the silken river, purity, the images of Monterey pines swooped over the water etched into the back of my head, cook, serve, eat, sleep. In between were whispers of him; never conversations, just a string of secrets kept behind the closed stable doors.
I took off again in October, this time to the jungle, in search of something – it was always something more – and was met with that, bigger and more calm than I’d been expecting. I knew I couldn’t come back to the smallness of the coast, especially not in winter; not the bleakness and the grey and the gaps between the walls that extinguished the fire. I don’t remember cooking when I got home.
I began on my brother’s couch in Archway. November was streaked with sunlight and I would walk to the Heath to swim. I barely remember what I did for work; that was the point of coming back to London. I ended up working for a tech start up focused on mending women’s relationship to sex, and I spent half of my week talking to women about how they felt about sex whilst never having any myself. I tried to ask myself the same questions I’d ask them, and would retreat upon thinking about it, either from shame or sadness or confusion.
I fell in love with the city when Kyla arrived, seeing it through her fresh eyes, the haziness of the following autumn walking down Columbia Road and picking fresh bunches of eucalyptus, drinking negronis outside at Bright, lying in the rose garden on towels with a bag of cherries, and drinking bottles of pinot noir with bags of popcorn. We existed mainly in my flat, her sat on the counter while I made dinner. Sometimes potatoes turned into a salad. Sometimes orzo simmered in tomatoes and their juices then flecked with feta. Often martinis drunk one after the other on my sofa.
The pandemic came, Kyla left, and I fell in love not with the city but with my little sealed corner. The way the windows of my flat would open all the way in, so sun could stream through from morning until the afternoon. How I never felt guilty about staying in and the way I returned to the kitchen, documenting my meals, feeling life through food. I drank bottles of good wine delivered direct to my door and played ping pong at London Fields and picked up the good eggs from Pavilion. The world opened up a little, Kyla returned, tables and chairs were laid out over cobbled streets in Soho, the return of the city triumphant, dangerously so.
A trip back down to the coast, the last before Kyla was to leave for good, ironically marked a new chapter of London. A new him cycling down the hill under the full moonlight, eyes bright after swimming in the bioluminescence of that silken river I loved so much. It was there we had our first swim just hours later, and then again to the cove we named Mermaid’s, and just beyond that our first kiss that tasted like Moretti beer and the promise of a first love.
London felt brand new when he arrived in it. Life stretched beyond my little corner of north east London and across the river to southerly spots I’d rarely ventured to. Half weeks spent on the top of the hill where I gained perspective impossible in the lowlands of Hackney. He called Hackney the marshland, and I liked that we lived between the marsh and the hill, where we’d keep each other in our pockets, for better or for worse.
Mainly mornings began with a coffee made not in the way I would usually do so; Aeropress, a new skill I had to learn, mine always in a light grey mug emblazoned with the words San Diego, in a type I loved but didn’t know why. On weekends we ate burritos from Route 66, an airstream at the Horniman Farmer’s Market, sat in the part of the park not swarming with people, but always going past the llamas, me with my hand in his pocket. We would walk through the woodland, noting the modernist estates and I went to Crystal Palace park for the first time, in awe of how it undulated so expansively, and we sat next to the lions - or were they sphinxes – by the ruins of the old Palace, talking talking talking.
He liked the rooftop, so we would bring chairs and blankets up and meet his neighbours for beers and cigs and occasionally a joint at sunset, watching the sky turn to black, the city glittering ahead. He’d show me where my flat would be, beyond the glassy point of the Shard, and I loved our life, even if it was just us and no one else.
It lasted as long as it was supposed to and after a heartbreak spring, the following summer was tinged with hope and excitement and a new London. It was a summer of pubs and pints and dancing in courtyards with people who shimmered. London felt alive again. I couldn’t imagine leaving, allowing this part of the city to become my safe haven once again. I performed and practised new rituals. Feelings of loneliness started to dissipate, longing returned and the heartache felt good because it was just good to feel.
I made meatballs and fed friends and lost myself a little but in a way that felt necessary to re-find my way; I loved life and London and I think it was what I needed at the time. Local became something real, not just a term I’d talk about in strategy meetings or something I associated with life by the coast. When do you become a Londoner? I’m not sure I ever was, but this was when I felt the closest.
Life goes in cycles and I found I couldn’t stop writing about stagnancy, stuckness, and a lack of inspiration. I spent a winter wishing it away, worrying about money, feeling so deeply sure that I would not stop feeling like this. This is the thing about London. It is so brilliant and blinding and then suddenly it’s not, and all the chaos and harshness of the city starts to puncture your happiness. It was not a fast fall or even a sadness. More of an indifference that made me tired, and reminded me of that Samuel Johnson quote. I was tired of London. But not of life.
Have you ever interrogated how events in your life have unfolded? I’ve spent my thirties lamenting how active and alive I was in my twenties. All of those decisions I made to step out of situations and into some new potential. Upon further reflection, I realised that I had just been a yes person. I rarely sought out these new opportunities, they were simply presented to me and I said, yes. Either these opportunities became fewer and far between, or I had become more accustomed to the rootedness of home, my sealed little kingdom, that I couldn’t see them as clearly. I was waiting for something to arrive at my doorstep so I could take the path of least resistance. I was looking to avoiding making a decision.
And that’s what happened, although I think it might be the universe giving me one last gift before I have to grow up and make the hard decisions myself. A summer by the coast with no strings attached. The best season to return, this time to the wilder west, as far out as you can get without reaching water.
It isn’t London I’m leaving. Or even the coast that I’m going to. I arrived to the city not brand new but different. I’m leaving not altered but renewed. Yes, life goes in cycles. I think I misinterpreted the cycles for opposites and tried to fit myself in one, or the other. It might be time to go around, not between.
I'm curious what makes you "lament" having all those opportunities and experiences in your twenties. I sometimes feel I didn't say yes enough in that decade of my life, because I was too afraid, and now in my thirties, feel that I can't gain that time or opportunity back. But as you say, "it may be time to go around, not between".
Here’s to us saying more yeses in our thirties!