As I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for my head to stop spinning, sipping on a glass of stagnant water filled with stale, iridescent bubbles, images from the previous night cascaded through my mind. There was wine, spirits, more wine… more spirits… and dancing. Lots of dancing. Crazy moves, big moves, bold moves, total abandonment of body, mind and self-control. Dancing with friends, dancing alone, dancing with the man now lying next to me. I slowly massaged my brow in a belated attempt to melt the thought away.
Looking over at him, the semi-stranger sleeping beside me, I slowly shuffled my way out of the bed and across the corridor to the bathroom. I glanced in the mirror at my reflection: tousled hair with last night’s make-up, a squiggly smear of mascara underlining each eye like a spelling mistake. If this was being young and free it certainly wasn’t as enjoyable as my friends had suggested. It was all their fault, obviously.
I crouched above the strange, cold toilet pan, the back of my thighs skimming the bowl, my mouth stinging as if stripped by a razor blade. I wasn’t about to play the blame game. It was all my own choice, a mess that I had gotten myself into in a moment of panic – a searing fear that I might be getting left behind. But falling behind whom? Myself? As I spun the empty cardboard toilet roll hoping to magic a stream of paper, it seemed as if I’d forgotten to learn the rules to a game that I was now, apparently, an expert at playing.
It was late December, and waking up was beginning to hurt. I made my way across the pavement, halfway between streetlights and sunlight, and turned onto the street that was familiar. I started the day carrying make-up in my handbag, using a public toilet as my vanity: a wanderer, a nomad in between places. And that’s exactly where I was, in between places.
I longed for my early twenties: the days of the invincible and raw misconception of youth. It was all fun and games back then. If you don’t invest fully then no one gets hurt. But unfortunately, my recent experience with one particular man – the only man, in fact – had become a harsh lesson that I was wrong. We’d met, feelings were felt and it was now over. I’d been hurt.
In my mind the cause of these relationship problems is that men and women don’t understand one another; that, as the well-known book says, we literally are on different planets when it comes to matters of the heart and relationships. Of course, what transpired, in human form, was a cosmic connection that no amount of textbook knowledge could account for. My friend Sean assures me that when it comes to the formidable topic of that four-letter word beginning with ‘l’ ending with ‘e’, both on the outskirts of ‘o’ and ‘v’, there is no distinct correlation between the sexes. It’s just quite hard, for all of us.
We live in the digital age of a steady stream of information right there on our computer screens, influencing our relationship to commerce, the food we eat and now, even our love lives. We can flick through the online catalogue of human faces, swiping left or right depending whether we like what we see, in exactly the same way our grandmothers picked out a cut of meat at the butcher’s. It’s safe, sterile even, but not quite real. Before we’ve even met them we know a person’s age, occupation, habits, likes, dislikes – basically all the information our ancestors would have found out across a table in the romantic haze of candlelight and that second bottle of wine. We look to our ancestors with a smug confidence that we know better. We live safe in the knowledge that while the notches on the bedpost rack up, no one ever has to get bored with each other.
But through the bright lights and heavy laughter of a fun night out, a little voice of truth inside knew this wasn’t for me. I couldn’t even handle a man not texting me back, never mind flicking past my face amidst the scores of other women, ten or even twenty at a time. In this twenty-first-century world, I’m almost embarrassed to say that I have remained tied to the notion of monogamy, or old-fashioned love, as it’s now known. A stagnant belief that I should probably keep to myself, not exactly like the love we see in the movies but in my heart of hearts, not far off either. I bet Tom Hanks didn’t have to ask Meg Ryan if she was still seeing other people as they made their way down from the top of the Empire State Building.
For both sexes, it’s certainly been a transition. Although every generation will say they were witness to an epic change in cultural climate – the Thirties’ prohibition, the world war of the Forties, the sexual revolution of the Sixties and Seventies – I still maintain that the biggest change, both in the cultural and social climate, was the dawn of the digital age. The invention of the Internet brought along with it a speed of living beyond anybody’s imagination. We have the ability to remain in touch with lost friends, lost colleagues… even past loves. But I can’t help but think that there are some people who were just meant to be left behind.
As we look around amidst the sea of fast culture, our minds and hearts are expected to keep up with an ever-changing, ever-evolving landscape. Fast love turns to fast disappointment – a speedy turnover in a global economy piling pressure on those struggling to keep up. Me being one of them. We’ve lost the element of fear that drives us to do the unimaginable, the senseless. We must focus on those spectacular and rare moments when our hearts overrule our heads and swiping a screen is revealed to be just that, a perfunctory movement completely separate from the glimmer of excitement that the sound of a voice brings or the way the heart beats when a certain person is near.
Instead, we keep ourselves at a distance through computer screens, safe inside the trenches, afraid to advance towards enemy lines. But within this battle of dating warfare it is sometimes hard to work out who the real winners even are. It certainly wasn’t me and it certainly wasn’t now.
And where else do we set this tale of the digital age but in the vast, diverse, empowering city of London. She is the modern-day metropolis inhabiting a wilderness of magic, mystery and intrigue. To me, London is the only permanent fixture within the landscape of movement, bright lights and imagination, a heady mix of corporate business and artistic dreaming: an odyssey of restaurants, bars and nightlife and people… oh so many people, all collectively inhabiting as a bottleneck of strangers, roommates, bedmates and friends. It is the man-made land where the lonely find company and the unemployed find jobs amidst part-time renters and full-time problems.
And it isn’t so bad: except the overcrowding, the pollution and the house prices because here, anything is possible, and as much as I wanted to stay under the duvet and come out once the storm had passed, I knew that I had no other option but to set sail. I had a career to find, a love to forget and a future to behold.
So as I stand on the precipice of a year so unpredicted, I’m going to ask a small question to the universe and see what I get offered back: why do I feel so unshakeably restless and what will inevitably be enough? And if, as I anticipate, the road gets a little bumpy, my armour will come in the form of my friends. The collection of people whom you choose to ride the wave with: the truth-tellers, the heart-menders, my people to live for.
I met Amber at an after-hours course on corporate law. I was failing my second term quite badly by then and had embarked on some extra-curricular activity in a desperate attempt to boost both my grades and my passion for the subject. Amongst the rows and rows of twenty-year-olds in suits, Amber sat perched on a stool diligently scribbling into a hot pink notebook. She smiled and waved me over.
‘Weren’t you here last week?’ she said. ‘Bit dry, wasn’t it…’
‘A bit,’ I said, looking around at the huddles of people talking confidently about shareholder’s rights.
‘I’ve got a party later – correction – I’m working at a party later, it’s