Tick.
Tock.
Tick.
Tock.
Opening my eyes to the beginnings of a new day.
I don’t smoke, barely drink, have never experienced casual sex and so this was the tasting menu of new discoveries. I had decided to dip my toe in the final waters of youth as an almost goodbye to my carefree years, complete with late nights and a series of events that had caused my heart to pound and my head to spin. What began with a plethora of shots and inappropriate dancing with a man I barely knew but had worked with my friend, so not a total stranger; perhaps emotionally but certainly not geographically, had now ended with the realisation that the answer to my predicament did not lie at the bottom of a bottle. I had persuaded myself I would see him again, clinging onto the slim thread that last night meant something. But it didn’t. And to be totally honest, lashing out at the world as redemption for a broken heart just wasn’t as fun as I had imagined it would be.
I was getting over someone. Charlie. Perhaps not going the right way about it but trying all the same. And although my appearance suggested I was carefree, inside I was hurting. Slowly seeping through the cracks of my show, my life, was the added complication of a career low. On a whim that was no longer whimsical, I had left university and a path to study law, exchanging it for the butterflies-in-your-tummy notion that you should chase what sets your heart on fire. I’d lit the match only for it to fizzle into charcoal once the reality hit that photography jobs aren’t exactly easy to come by. My dreams had been dowsed cold by stress and financial burden. And now, adding the salt to my wounds, having made the somewhat optimistic decision to move in with a man I’d just met and barely knew, I was back in my old bedroom and back in the flat I’d shared for years with my best friend, Amber. Despite many a raised eyebrow, I’d ridden the wave of infatuation all the way to the shores of his flat overlooking the Thames and now I’d slunk back, just three months later, humiliated and alone.
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,