Escapism and Rebirth

I’m sitting in a studio that reeks of cigarettes and overnight kebab, my jaw is aching from yawning excessively. I’m working on 4 essays that are due next week, and I finally convince my friend to exit her duvet cocoon and accompany me to Subway - I heard her tummy grumbling like a sad whale so I knew she wouldn’t resist. After a 10 minute stroll of playing ‘No I’m going to shamelessly fail this semester’ game, I suddenly stop in my tracks. ‘Do you want to go to London?’ I adventuresomely ask. A glisten starts developing in her eyes and her lips start to smirk, and in seconds I start running after her roaring with laughter, heading towards the bus station. Needless to say we impulsively decided to hop on the first the bus wearing our embarrassingly childish pajamas, unkempt hair and a total of £100 in our pockets. Despite the fact that I have been to London more times than I can count, that night, London was wearing her finest dress burlesque dress. The hands of the clock were encroaching midnight – my friend and I got lost along the misty cold night and I was stumbling between millions of elated strangers crowding the streets in anticipation of London’s biggest firework show.The biting cold could drill through one’s bones, yet the hundreds of thousands breaths around me generated a warmth that made me feel like an awe-struck teenager circling her first bonfire. As I ran towards London Bridge to find a spot to watch, everything around me felt transcendental – the historical buildings that are laden with history, stories and nostalgia were reverberating with this very current life, as if tonight was going to be written down in the pages of London’s diaries. The Thames river was hurriedly surging with such a vivacious force; it was gushing in parallel with the rushing footsteps of the people running on the concrete bridges above it – shimmering with city lights, lighter sparks and thousands of in-door luminous TVs, crawling out of patience to broadcast the moment the world experiences rebirth. As the clock struck, lovers and strangers alike embraced with kisses that I’d be unjust to understate: there were kisses of relief, love, rekindling and renewal. The notion of love in that moment embodied millions of faces that the Oxford Dictionary is yet to accommodate. And me? I fell deeper in love. 237 years later and Samuel Johnson’s statement still rings true: “When a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford.”