five years in London

life is big but also small

Five years is not long, but long enough to see your favourite restaurants close and new ones open, long enough for the coffee to go from £2.70 to £4.60. Long enough to see Aesop stores replace local shops in zones 2, 3, and 4. Long enough to do many things on your list, but not everything, long enough to triple your income but still feel forced to move further and further out because no matter how fast you run, you’re never fast enough.

Five years is not a long time, but it’s long enough to go through seven versions of yourself, maybe eight? Long enough to make friends and lose friends. Long enough to start saying I’m going home and not be referring to the place you grew up. Long enough to know you prefer Oxford over Cambridge and Isle of Wight over Cornwall. Five years is long enough for you to realize the thing that brings you all the life and energy is also the thing slowly killing you. It’s time to go. Not yet, but soon.

In London, everyone and everything is 45 mins away so when you go traveling and people ask you if you enjoyed your trip, you start saying very uninteresting things like yeah it was cool, the city was small, so everything was close

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When I moved here, I wanted life to be big. The feeling of being anonymous was so liberating it felt like I was swimming in it. I couldn’t understand how all my memories would fit inside one brain. One brain! Now, I want to make life smaller. Just me, dinner, and all my things; I want to wake up next to my things. Parks. Grass. I want the floor I walk on to be mine.

The girl in the weird supermarket knows my coffee order, so I never have to ask her. She knows. Life is small but also big. Thank you London, for allowing me to live a big life and a small life at the same time. You’re slowly killing me, but I do get to choose here. I can do both. 

Maybe that’s why I’m still here.