[ ACTION ]
London. And I’m back! I am back in the city I left months ago because things stopped making sense, and I stopped doing all the things I should be doing. I once wrote that you don’t necessarily belong to the place where you were born. Sometimes you have to dwell and walk different roads, stop at different stations, and reached numerous destinations. I have lived in some different places, and I have concluded that no place is set for good. Home can be an ongoing development, a constant search of a place in the world where you feel safe, or you feel connected, or you feel pushed and motivated to do something. You may be “lucky” to always feel “home” from the moment you were born, or find a place somewhere down the road, or never find it. London is my Home for the time being – it may be my home for the rest of my days, or until the end of next year. Who knows? Contrary to what the song says, home is not wherever you are with someone; home is wherever you are with yourself. If you’re in a place always thinking or wanting to be somewhere else, then there’s something wrong – even if that “somewhere else” is still a mystery yet to be defined. You might be in the most dazzling gorgeous city in the world (I AM sure I was!) or forrest or beach, with splendid food and warm people, but somehow, no matter how much you try…there’s no connection, there’s no reassurance. That experience will mould you, change you, make you think and feel in a ton of different ways you had no clue there were, but still you need to keep on moving, and searching until one day you might find it.
That is why I don’t like places for their postcards. Places are not made up of touristic sites but of the lives of the people living in them. The people who wander on their streets, who make them pulse and build them up. People who planted their lives on those places the cultivated their own crops. London is not Tower Bridge, or Buckingham Palace, or Fish and Chips or the Thames. London is me walking non-stop, is that pint I have at the end of the day speaking to and shaking the hand of someone I will never see again, me running for the bus and missing it, it’s the cabbie calling me “love” with an accent, it’s the lack of air conditioning in the tube, it’s the saying “sorry” just for the sake of it… it’s my own writing of my own daily life and me taking control of my destination.
Ah and back to my Timberland boots!
[ CUT ]
Pint in Havaianas 