Sometimes You Want to Go

There is no better place to hide than in London.

The cold here forces you to bundle up. Covered in thick layers to shelter your skin from the stinging chill, you shield your dully aching heart. Stick your nose inside your coat, wrap your face up in a scarf, pull your hood as tight around yourhead as it will go and no one can see the tears slipping quietly down your cheeks as you stare into the corner on the tube. Everyone is too busy trying to concentrate on how to get where they're going without freezing their own arse off to bother looking in anyone else's direction, anyway. Add to this the sheer size and population of the city, and you've got endless places to hide.

Even if you were to walk into a shop or onto a train, face uncovered and shining with tears, scant few people would acknowledge you. Most would politely endure whatever hiccuping request you could manage, and have you on your way as quickly as possible. It is a place where you can be truly alone, even when surrounded by people. Because none of them give a shit about you. And sometimes this is precisely what you need. When you feel miserable and lonely, sometimes what you need is not a pick-me-up but a bring-you-down. The last thing you want is to have your faith in humanity restored. Rather, you need something that confirms what you suspect at that moment yourself: that in fact, no one does love you and you have no one but yourself. There is only one comfort to be had, and that is the satisfaction of being right.

Aaliya once said of her day at work that if one person had been mean to her she would have started crying. I have more of the opposite. I was on the tube and sad and as I tried to move my suitcase further into the corner for an older gent, he said, "no, you're all right." And I very quietly lost it. It is when I'm having a bad day and someone wants to give me a hug. When all I want is to hate everyone and someone has to go and wreck it by making me a cup of tea.

In London, when I can usually count on people to be snide and snarky and generally over me as only people in a large city - and especially English people in a large city completely over its tourists - can be, nothing can upset me more than when a fellow helps me up the stairs with my suitcase, then promptly and kindly disappears to go and catch his own train, as he has gone out of his way to help me.