An Expat Living in London

Anxious hours. It is Friday night in London and the pub is a madhouse. The Thames is saturated with the smell of drunkenness and loose talk. Cigarette in my mouth I take a break from the frenzy and watch the rain dribble down the backs of lovers and tourists walking along the South Bank. I could not help but wonder that it is now my eighth month in the city. I don't have a plan, a destination, let alone a return ticket. I am the luckiest man alive. Sure, an endless gloom hovers over the city's grey buildings and glassed towers. Its robust bridges never seem to age and the haste never seems to stop, but it was in this vibrant city where a Sri Lankan man taught me how to pour the perfect pint, where an English arboriculturist inspired me to go vegan, it was here where I met my Italian fiancée Valentina.

She and I dreamt a whole lot in this city. We walked around the dingy streets of Bermondsey for hours talking about the past and the kind of life we used to want. That is as far as our dreaming went - just talks. It seemed as if all the charms and totems of our old lives had fallen into the blackness of the river and we didn't care as much as to stop and pick up the pieces. We grew indifferent to the prospect of time, no more yesterdays to amend or futures to cling on. We relished in the notion of London as our purgatory and whatever we did here left no footprints. I suppose the city numbed us. We became desensitized from society's constant struggle for stability. There was no longer a need for us to be a prime minister or a doctor, an artist or a winner, we just lived comfortably in the poetry of our self-inflicted exiles.

I take one last drag of my cigarette. I survey the damp streets. An air of morbid tranquility has descended, as if the Friday night madhouse is about to end. I return inside and can't help but think that London is a pub and those of us who stay here long enough will realize how easy it is to leave just as it is to stay. When the music stops and the lights are turned on, I will walk and feel broken shards crunching beneath my soles. I will try to make my way in the one of the most congested rooms in Europe and lose every word in translation. I am detached as an expat and I am unable to fathom my reasons for having come to this city. Despite all these weary anxieties, London is my redeeming moment; all of its uncertainties fuel me to search for something I have yet to understand, and to keep moving with such devastating weightlessness.