Why I write, right now

Because I'll never be young and healthy and happy and 26 alone in London again !!!!!!!

I write, right now, because I want to remember this feeling exactly.

That the wind picked up on my way home and rain came down as soon as I unlocked my door after hot yoga on Monday. That there were raindrop pelts cutting my window by the time I took off my shoes.

That I finished my second journal at the same time that I finished my third Bonne Maman strawberry jam jar, which I repurpose for overnight oats. Life is measured in these objects that take us forward and keep us full.

That I wake up with a song stuck in my head everyday and I don't know when I started noticing this. The tracks currently swap between the long “Ohhh” of “Oh, there was Heaven in your eyes” from Noah Kahan's She Calls Me Back, and "Do you want a house tour?” from you guessed it.

I want to remember that I've declared this month as the month I'm seriously building back confidence in myself. It's taken me a year to feel settled in a new city and in that time I've come closer and closer everyday to figuring out what I like and what it feels like to be sure of it.

I want to remember how it felt when my sister recently visited and said she was proud of me for building a life here, as I ferried her through Hyde Park and to tea and to my neighborhood jaunts I declared treasures. That I remember getting emotional visiting her in her new city when she moved years ago, feeling a confusingly sure pull within myself to do something similar. To go somewhere else, to see if I could too, build something out of nothing. I didn't realize I'd been holding my breathe until she said that, validated in this way, what I had been looking to as a full-circle moment. It was sweet and worth it, and entirely for myself.

I want to remember that I am good at recognizing patterns and memorizing numbers. At least for now I am.

How playing games via Discord with my boyfriend makes me happier than I'd ever expect it to, because he is patient and encouraging and sharing in something he enjoys. And the time passes quickly because we are doing something together that isn't just catching up at the end of our days.

I want to remember that I know where to stand waiting for the tube on my way to work, and how to adjust if the morning is more crowded than usual. Because the usual is familiar.

I want to remember that when I started saying “I love taking care of you" to myself, it started off as a plea to please be gentle, please. I am somewhat sadistically enticed by the uncomfortable, the pressure that makes diamonds, the grit in a plea deal for change. But just because something is hard doesn't mean it matters. Just because it hurts, doesn't mean you're growing. Sometimes it just sucks, and the hardest thing to do may actually be just letting go.

I want to remember how it seems like suddenly, I am feeling clothes on my body differently and I think it is a right of passage as a woman. How the blue mock neck, short sleeve H&M top passed down from my older sister (which has somehow stood the test of time) all of a sudden just rubbed me the wrong way, how I took it off at the end of the day and said out loud, “This is the last time I am ever going to wear this”, before folding it away on my donation pile. How that keeps happening with clothes I know and tolerate, that lose their temperance in random intervals.

How I’ve come to terms with the fact that I just don't like cooking and I may have a sugar addition, which I’m trying to Pavlov away by eating too many grapes that make my stomach and teeth hurt. The theory is that this is probably better for me than the gummy candy that makes my jaw and heart hurt.

I want to remember that my hair is getting longer, and how whenever I Facetime friends and family from home they remark on it. And how I’ve been in London long enough to yearn for the Chop, which I do every year or so because my hair grows like a weed until it overwhelms me to the point of extreme frustration. How I’ve never felt more like myself than when I had bright pink hair during Covid, how I tell myself, this is the season I’m going to do it again, every time the trees change, and I never do.

I want to remember how it feels to have all the time in the world to get to know myself. That as soon as a plan hits my diary — a social plan that I used to pray for and use as a way to track my progress, to be around people was winning, was growth — I envy the empty space it inhibits. How I’ve started to say no to social plans because now, I can. My year of saying yes to absolutely everything (literally everything) has given way to building back my own boundaries, using what I’ve learned to erect ivy gates I can pass through as I please, not walls with moats where my peace is Rapunzel.

I want to remember how I find myself drawn to textures and metallic shapes. And contained collages and spots of red. Red is a part of me.

I want to remember how movement is my medicine. How I lived 17 years of my life barely exercising before finding a sport and kinetic energy that changed me and how I never want to feel weak again. How I return to my body again and again and it makes me feel like my purpose is to keep moving. How most times it feels like medicine, sometimes like a forced overdose to get out of my head.

I want to remember my untamed eyebrows. And pale skin, because it’s the UK and I’ve never been this pale in my life. And the platinum ring I wear now because I gave my sister my gold one, the one with my full name engraved on the inside. This platinum one is also engraved, with the year “2015”. Giving it to her freely was a practice in loving something and letting it go. I’d worn that ring everyday since I was 16.

I want to remember the rush I felt the first time I wrote on here and it not being perfect but it feeling right. I had gone to the first interval session of my run club that evening, immediately after hitting post, feeling elated and speedy and like my heart was pounding outside of my chest because I made something out of nothing for the first time in a long time. And the 800m intervals had something to do with it too, I’m sure.

I want to remember how missing him comes in crashing waves out of nowhere. How I laughed when people asked me how we would manage with long-distance for, what, 2 years?, and I said 2 years is nothing and nodded to convince them and myself. 2 years would feel like no time at all when we wanted to spend a lifetime together. And still I almost can't believe it's going so well — yet sometimes, a lifetime doesn’t feel long enough either and my breathe hitches and I immediately wish my feet were in between his.

I want to remember how I’ve gotten used to staying inside on a beautiful day, if I want to stay inside. Sometimes I’ll close my blinds and celebrate the decision with a long, hot shower just because I can. The shower is my happy place. That hasn’t, and I doubt will ever, change.

I want to remember the walks and runs in the park, wide loops marked in kilometers and time tracking down on the weekdays, ticking up on the weekends. Old playlists with the dust brushed off and tight hips and knees hitting the pavement. The fresh glow of morning and evening sun slicing through the trees at the top of Hyde Park, the clear stretch above me in sky blue or pink or navy or turquoise on my way back.

These knobs on the stove and my spine and cracks under the windows and my knuckles, the 88 steps up to my flat and Hampstead Heath dirt on my sneakers, the dress shoes to the grocery store and empty perfume bottles, the turned-down bed in the evening and drained phone battery post Facetimes, the unopened watercolor kit and overcrowded journals, the stack of coasters from holiday bars and restaurants and blue sky dome outside my window, that bolden color I can never quite grasp. These moments that mark my days and call back to me as the here and now, marking what I hear and know.

I want to remember it like this. I’ll never be young and healthy and happy and 26 alone in London again!! I want to remember it like this.

xx