The Best, Worst, & Everything Between—Reflections on London

Written by Devaki Jayal

There’s a crackle to my last few months in London. These two years have been surfeited with joy and I have been regaled but it was a manic, druggish type of happiness. Always different, always shifty with the skittish weather. I changed so much that I feel how I did at eleven, seething in the monsoon night, waiting out my aching, growing limbs. I’ve reeled into a new self – but just as I gather to go, finally life is settling. I’ve loved my friends since I met them but I know them now and we’ve changed together. In my first year I would wake up, shot-up with cortisol, sweating out the collective uncertainty of all those cubed rooms full of students teetering over one another. These days I lounge, I go to my favourite café, and blur at the edges slowly, unfurling, with the knowledge of my buoyant joy, of a life I love with people I dreamed of from stagnant, dead rooms years ago. In class, we learnt about streets as sites of memory, and it feels like the truest urban guide to London I’ve read in a while. When I moved here, I would tell my mother: life here happens on the go. On pavements, on foot, stood between melty students and finance bros on the tube. In between homes. My worst heartbreak on an express train from the airport. I felt grown up and jaded but I know I was just a kid, sad and shaky over someone who felt bigger than the city, bigger than the island, tenacious even from across the channel. A year later and I tread memories that used to gut me for fun. I am a little victorious about my disinterest with emotional melancholia that truly was my most uncontrollable trait. That’s the thing about living in London. You move on twice as fast. The half-lives of your emotions divide. Good news on my walk to the grocery store. Some bad news and it’ll make my heart stop but then it has to start again because my bus is here and I gotta go because I am late already, and my friends will kill me. Epiphany on a curb-side evening, pub-goers sweaty and leaned on the wall next to me. I wake up and I think – I will be a writer like I always wanted to be. Then I fall through the day, and I’ve seen my friends and my thoughts stilled into nothing but a yearning for fun nights and park days and study dates. But the night thickened, and the excitement of the city seeped into me. I saw a movie by myself at the cinema that you can just step into from under the bridge near my apartment and now I want to move to nowhere and slip into anonymity, into a lifetime of danger and adrenaline. I think: these roller-coaster days aren’t always good for me, so I take the train to the cold ponds and dunk myself into its mirror surface until I am quietly furled once more. I think, here I get to have it all.  

I am cognizant of how I have romanticized the city as a visitor, and a privileged one. It’s true. But I hate it sometimes too. The homes are shrinking, and people are trying, and I know for many it’s made a claustrophobic place of a city they loved. Greed finds its way to most special places. I used to find some places thrilling and flashy and now they’re grating a little because I know how they were fed with the remains of the past. I’ll be on the tube, and I can’t help it, I listen. Everyone is angsty, worrying, jittery. But they also have this absurd humour, here. Of being funny and honest and endearing through a lot of it.  

I try to be an adult about life and hone a classy pessimism, and sometimes that’s easier than normal if I saw or heard or felt something sad but I do love it here and I want to put powder gelatin into every moment and still it for later. Even the bad ones. Because it’s still such vivid life. I know when we’re all away, and then, gone, off to smaller, manageable lives, I will think of these as the good old days and I find that unbearable. So, in true fashion: this makes my heart race with fear. I try to think of a theme, a category for these two years in London as I leave it for a while – I do like to bookkeep my memories. But I can’t, its collaged and miasmic and it’s more authentic that way. Because it didn’t happen like I thought it would, I did not neatly find myself like a key slotting into a lock. The key didn’t fit, and I think someone might have broken the lock so I decided to start climbing in through the window. Everything exploded outwards and I found out that that is me and that is the city. This is not a resolution and there certainly is no satisfying last word I get to have on life here. But that’s just how it feels to me and it won’t be the same for any two people because it is a crocheted place.  

It's just such a fun age. It’s a heady paradise and an anxious hellscape. Because it is the worst but it is also the goddamn best. 

film Photography by Natalie Walsh

Memories overlayed onto memories in kaleidoscopic fashion