Left My Heart in London

"When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford."

It's been two months since I left London and I'm still missing it like crazy. I'm sure you've gathered by now that this post isn't going to be my usual style+fashion post, but I need this post for me. To spill out all the nostalgia surrounding this city that still haunts me. A form of catharsis, perhaps, but to be honest, writing about London will probably just make me miss it even more. 

It's 10:42 PM here on the West Coast of the US of A and I'm sitting here wishing I could hop on a plane and fly to London because all I want to do is:

• Walk around the block from the London Center and watch Phantom of the Opera with my best friend Ronnie and cry my eyes out when the monkey box plays Masquerade whilst the Phantom sings 'Christine, I love you' in the most heartbreakingly beautiful notes my ears have ever heard. 
• Sit on the bridge in front of the London Eye at night and watch the city lights glitter and sparkle in the River Thames. 
• Go to Tate Modern because, sometimes, all I need to do is look at a painting or photograph for life to make sense again and because there's a certain kind of clarity I found at the Tate that I can't seem to find anywhere else. In my moments there, I managed to escape the monotony of the daily grind of reality and enter a fantastical realm of colors and beautiful absurdity. For me, it is the place where soul meets body.
• Go to Pizza Hut (They had All You Can Eat Buffet at lunchtime for only 7 pounds!), Chipotle, McDonald's, or any of the other American restaurants I found myself ironically eating in. But, weirdly enough, it was those American foods that made my existence in London all the more real. 
• Sip that delicious cake-like white chocolate mocha at Scooter Cafe and get lost in the atmosphere of lively chats and caffeine aromas. 
• Attempt to climb the lions in Trafalgar Square because that shit is hard. 
• Listen to Ronnie bemoan the death of Millie's Cookies whilst shaking his fist angrily in front of the empty space which it once occupied. 
• Run around the city until all I can hear is the beating of my own heart drumming in sync with the thousands of other hearts in the city— connecting me to strangers I probably will never meet and making them seem like the oldest of friends. 
• Feel the electricity of a city so full of life and love and dreams and heartache and wisdom and beauty and history and everything that I've ever needed. 
• Sit on the rails of the skate park and look at the wonderfully quirky and kooky styles Londoners aren't afraid to wear. 
• Walk to class at 9 AM with the unrelenting London wind blowing in my face, trip over a crack in the road, and choke on my breakfast carrot because, in retrospect, even the bad days in London seem beautiful. 

Ah, there is just so much I could write and, if I did, I'd probably be typing words into this white box forever. I miss London so much my heart physically hurts and I won't do the city the injustice of using words to explain how much it means to me because in that respect words fail completely. What I will say is I am certainly going to spend the rest of my life dreaming of this place and because I know this, I also know that I am going to do everything I can to return so I can stay forever. Because London just feels right. 

As I spill all my feelings about London into the unknown depths of the Internet, Obadiah Parker's cover of Hey Ya has been on repeat. I remember first encountering this song in a small bar in Florence, Italy and then seeing the words, "I love you because the whole universe conspired for us to meet," etched on one of the bar's bathroom walls and then playing this song on YouTube after returning from my Spring Break trips to Italy and Spain and thinking about how much London felt like home and how lucky I was to find this home. As we grow older, I think a lot of us lose that sense of home because the houses we grew up in become just houses. We're left dreaming of this home that some of us never quite find. For a long time in my own life, I've been homesick for a place that didn't exist. Then, I found London. In that moment, between the sweet acoustics of Obadiah's Hey Ya and this epiphany, I believed in fate. The whole universe conspired for us to meet. And it was in this simple moment that I found love, serenity, happiness, eternity. 

And I guess that's the thing I miss most about London, the simple moments of pure perfection. Sitting in my flat with the music playing and sipping green tea and looking out my window at the hustle and bustle of the world's most enchanting city. 

xx