"We could walk through Leicester Square"
"London is a ticking clock, daring you to outrun it, to bluff its sell-by-date, to squeak out through a gap before it crumbles around you, Indiana Jones-style. There's a bar on the corner of Bethnal Green Road that each night counts down the seconds to last orders on an LED and it's a bit like that. 20,000 seconds left. Tick tock tick tock. When do you start counting how long it is you've been here? More importantly, when do you stop? We've come to understanding, me and it. We've signed an entente cordiale. At first we kept ourselves to ourselves, nodding politely to one another. Then without realising it we built a bond from the things in common we didn't know we had. I started to marvel at its buildings, get lost in its cemeteries, trace its history with my fingertips and find a solace in the place I carved out in it. It budged over, made some room for me.
Now it is a home, as close to a home as something this big and gruff and grey can be. I've nested with the person I love, made a little verdant pocket of our own, an oasis in its brickwork. What more do you need? Exactly. It's become the repeating cartoon backdrop on my windows, the puzzle that spider-webs away from me, that I found a me-shaped hole to fit into. It's a three-dimensional vortex that has no pattern or reason but somehow can be made to balance, like some nightmarish algorithm that if you spend long enough at you can teach yourself how to solve."
Now it is a home, as close to a home as something this big and gruff and grey can be. I've nested with the person I love, made a little verdant pocket of our own, an oasis in its brickwork. What more do you need? Exactly. It's become the repeating cartoon backdrop on my windows, the puzzle that spider-webs away from me, that I found a me-shaped hole to fit into. It's a three-dimensional vortex that has no pattern or reason but somehow can be made to balance, like some nightmarish algorithm that if you spend long enough at you can teach yourself how to solve."