My London.

I decided to move to London when I was 8. Of course I wasn’t allowed so I waited for 11 years to fly to the land that captured my soul. Excluding those 11 years of international long distance relationship, we had to go through another 2 years of local long distance relationship with occasional visits. Every walk counted, every person, every morning breeze that kissed the leaves, every bench next to the river Thames, every bridge and every corner of the street. It made me feel complete. The 3rd year was the most difficult. I genuinely hate the saying “love lasts 3 years”. Well.. On the 3rd year of our reciprocal, non-committal relationship, we got tired of each other. My beautiful city had nothing to offer me and I wasn’t trying my best to make it work. I remember that being the year I stumbled upon this quote, written on a statue in Gough Square: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life.” My self defence mechanism reacted straight away, convincing me ardently that it is not I – the one in the wrong. ‘London and I are just two separate entities that are not suited for each other.’ Two years of ins and outs and by the end of my 5th year I wanted to leave. It felt like this place that made me fall in love with it 16 years ago – evaporated and the kind air that used to dance with me – vanished into a mist of its own. I felt lonely. The world fell silent and I understood that maybe, I am a little tired of life after all. The magic of existence consists in its simple nuance of ephemerality.  Shattered in pieces, you always go back to places that felt like home. I stayed. Even though, small parentheses, on the summer of our 5th year, going into the 6th, I met St. Petersburg, but that is a different story. I came back home to my London. As the days passed by, the visible cracks of my still breathing vase were slowly filled with gold. Everything broken has its own, iridescent beauty. Every day I kept learning to love those golden cracks and with them, I rediscovered how much love I have for London. No one took it away from me, I just decided to be blind in the face of something real that pushed me towards my dreams and the cosmic being that I am.