How To Not Be Lonely In London
My Grandfather is a man of very little movement, born to both a mother and father of the East End in a back-to-back house in Barking, the furthest he has ever displaced himself is three miles, to the uniform terrace house in which he still resides eighty years later. This home, consistently seeped in the zeitgeist of the 1960s with its display cabinet of china dogs and faux-marble bust of Queen Victoria sat upon her eggshell lace doily, held me within its walls for brief yet defining snippets of my childhood. Its pleasant discordance from the modernity of my usual home in Devon and the bowl-of-soup comfort of a night with Nannie and Grandad shaped the City of London into an enchanted holiday home where the heating was always on and pennies in my pocket stretched as long and far as the Thames.
I took my first solo day trip when I was freshly sixteen, carting a tote bag emblazoned with V&A onto the 7am service to London Paddington, I felt as though my life was beginning, or at the very least transforming into something eclectic and optimistic. I spent a total of seven hours wandering the streets I had decided I owned, turning unfamiliar corners and willing the soles of my boots to brand themselves into the already set concrete. I took on Camden, Canary Wharf, and Covent Garden, hopping from museum to museum stopping only for sushi and overpriced cappuccinos that I swore were the best I’d ever had. Even in the interleaving periods sat on the tube: the breeze felt pale blue and pure and the automated voice urging me to mind the gap I swear was paying specific mind to me, knowing my tendency to walk without looking straight ahead. I decided then and there in a moment of comparative stillness to the hurtling of the S7 District Line stock, that I had made a hole in the air of London Town, and it one in me, that we both needed to fill again.
I have always been an idealist, a trait that’s morality is hotly debated amongst those in possession of glasses containing varying amounts of water, so when the summer of 2022 found me deciding on where I would study, the lucidly vibrant hubbub I once determined as my own seemed the only option worth a damn. My choice of degree seemed foolishly insignificant compared with my ardent desire to become a London dweller and while I am lucky in that this and my ideal degree were not mutually exclusive, I am almost certain I would have settled for a course of study unsuited to my mind and interests if it meant I could wake every morning in The Big Smoke. On receiving the fateful email containing my acceptance into London’s academic circle, the prospect of this new life became a fixation that spiralled out in my mind like my brain was an unravelling, dropped ball of wool, a fantasy so untainted and pliable that I could become the most cultivated and picturesque version of myself, yet tangible enough that I could not feel that inward collapse of the heart upon remembering the unattainability of dreams. I told myself I would wear bangles that announced my presence in vintage clothing stores, that I would read increasingly niche material on my commute, scribbling away and leaving passers by wondering how my horizons were so visibly expanding. I told myself I would read, and write, and walk, go to galleries, museums, and installations, always the girl who’s been there, and the girl who knows where you should go next. The Girl Who Lives In London.
My first week in London I decided to cut my hair, it sat at my jawline, almost cut-throat in its bluntness. I stuck pictures on my walls in varying hues of orange, shelved my books according to prestige, and any items with no defined place that I had not already culled I relegated to the bottom drawer of my new desk that doesn’t quite open all the way. With this rigid shroud of coffee cups and Kafka I believed myself indestructible, chainmail tied with ribbon. On my first night I left a party because the new me was too stiff to turn her head in conversation and for the first time I began to feel an uneasy discordance in my being between the girl I was and The Girl Who Lived In London who was slowly realising that the cigarettes she smokes are a financial burden and she can’t quite remember who wrote Don Quixote or what it is about. In the early days I got the bus to university, there was a kind of quiet effervescence that sat around my lungs as the surrealism of seeing the skyline over Waterloo bridge collided with the rhythmic monotony of my emerging routine and instilled on me a sense of gratitude that nearly made me close my eyes and pray to anybody who I thought might listen, even the mighty Thames itself. I was not always so lucky in my journey however as I often found myself absentmindedly stepping on a bus boldly blazoned with locations far from where I was expected in the early hours of those October mornings. Being thrown unplanned into those concrete suburbs felt horribly poignant; my visions of grandeur marbled and technicolour trodden into pavements like gum, chewed up and spat to the ground once it lost its flavour. ‘This is not where The Girl Who Lives In London goes’, I would think, and as I felt her slip away I turned back to try and grasp at the girl I was and realised that in hiding her beneath piles of thick faire isle jumpers and weighing her down with rosaries and rings, I had suffocated her. And as I lost those two girls who, like opposite poles of a magnet, repelled each other out of my body, my room gathered dust, my spider plant withered, and I became nobody.
I like to see people as mosaics, bits and pieces from those you love cut and stuck onto your being; walking collages made of admiration and shiny things. My bag was stolen within a week of living in London, my Grandfather told me how people could be Bad and that I should turn inwards and look out only for myself. He meant well and said it only out of that funny combination of love and fear but I took it too much to heart, grew my fringe so it covered my eyes and shut myself within my own mind so as never to be branded in some way by bumping into someone Bad. In theory this mindset worked, I have not been robbed since (touch wood). But my most natural instinct is to trust, at my truest I am a believer in the beauty of the human race, and teaching myself to play the cynic, to use animosity as an asbestos lining, rendered me paranoid and afraid and wholly at a loss as to who I was becoming: I had never been cruel, I had never not smiled, my eyes had never not fixed upon the gilded edges of clouds and thought only of goodness. Who was I now that the world seemed against me? I tried still to do and to see, to make the most of the city I found myself in, but without connection you remain that unpainted canvas, unseeing, unthinking, unfeeling without discussion and laughter to mottle your skin. Feeling the futility of art, music, and stage without the hues and tints of companionship, I retired to my needlessly curated room and let the Thames stand in as a restless and undamned metaphor keeping me apart from the city and the people within it. “I have come to resent this city” I wrote in my journal on the 5th of November 2023, I seemed to have submitted to the feeling of drowning in the bleakness, I don’t remember if I believed I would ever be able to bring myself to the surface again, I don’t know if it would make a difference either way.
One day, after months of tunnels, I decided to get the bus home again, something I had not done since those first weeks of my daydream. I do not know what made me change the route I’d followed day after day until it bore a furrow where I’d stepped, perhaps the station was closed, or maybe the sky was particularly blue that day. The sun was shining the way it does just before spring tilts back her head and spills out her heart- not blinding, but just enough to kiss my face like a spattering of freckles and as the river curled like a ribbon under the wheels, I looked again at the sunset over Westminster and remembered how I had once wondered. This wonder, refreshing in the way it was unprescribed, illuminated me in my entirety, the girl I was met the Girl Who Lives In London, who met the pieces of the people I love, who met the girl I am and the cracks between them I saw fill with gold the way a pot is restored by kintsugi. When I got off the bus I bought a bunch of tulips, straightened my bedsheets, and dusted my shelves. The next day I cut my fringe to take off the blinkers I’d imposed on myself, smiled at a woman taking a picture of a magnolia tree, and asked a girl on my course if she’d like to go for coffee. I grasped at each spur and bounced off the cuff. I decided to become tangible again; a real, shifting, moveable person unboxed by my past of feigned utopias so artificial and empty they each imploded upon inhabitance- I decided life was iridescent, sadness ephemeral, and being cosmic.
London brings with it the privilege of scale, its magnitude streaming from borough to borough, ignoring the limits of the sky and mocking the depths of the ground, over and under and up and down and left and right and every which way. You have two choices when faced with a city so large: to let it overwhelm you as you cling white knuckled to the rods that fix to your bones, or to let it make you let go, to realise that, though you do not need to hide, if you needed to do so, you do not need to do it within a self-made paper tent inside of you, the highrises and skyscrapers are remarkably kind and steadfast in the shelter they provide, you need only walk amongst them and smile at their kaleidoscopic, mirrored exteriors to find yourself at one with the city that leeches life, where vitality lives in vapours that twirl about you. London preaches togetherness, nowhere else is it as plausible that we are all halves searching for a whole that can be found in anyone willing to attend that play you wanted to see, or to try that new restaurant in Islington. I fall in love ten times a day in London: with eyes that glimmer with that same inkling that life is something bigger, with the prospect of poetry that sits unread and waiting for me in that bookshop on the corner, with smiles, stations, and street scenes, with words, windows, and walking routes. In a place so big of course there is much you could choose to hate, some unpleasant facts are still self-evident, but as every action has its equal and opposite reaction, love exists as the light casting shadows, and all you must do, to not be lonely in London, is to live in that light, to choose to see love, and to promise to live every day undefined.
Edited by Roxy-Moon Dahal Hodson
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