Walking in the rain by the embankment in London at Christmas, when the city's commuters have all gone home and deserted their glass and steel office buildings, they leave the square mile feeling like a ghost town. The only thing to comfort the passing traveler is the occasional homeless "Big issue" magazine seller braving the cold as unlike the many strangers who walk by you in silence, those magazine sellers by the Thames river have a reason to be nice, as they breathe warm air into their cupped hands to warm their gloved fingers in the biting cold. It's strange to say, but lost in London's architecture it can be a lonely and existentially daunting experience.
I remember I had just finished up ice skating at Broadgate, which is a gorgeous circular ice rink tucked in the heart of Liverpool street, and not wanting to go home to my horrible flatmates, I was stranded for the night, complete with Hello Kitty hoodie and my figure skating bag over my shoulder. I just needed some time alone.
So I didn't catch the tube home, and I walked for hours through London's medieval streets. I lost track of time. I walked all the way from Liverpool Street until I reached Monument and stood opposite pudding lane. It was a good time to think about Samuel Pepys' diary, the casualness and ferocity of that great fire of 1666 an ironic analogy to the one burning inside my head.
I had just finished that morning the final exams in my accounting and banking degree and I was, I guess, blowing off some steam walking through London, having been overwhelmed with studying for difficult exams for weeks.
Suddenly, like hitting a brick wall, the rigorous exam period was over, and unlike 24 hours ago when I had had my book wormish nose buried in economics textbooks, I now had nothing to do with the hours. Looming too on my mind was the fact that I was going to be spending Christmas day on my own, for the first time, this year.
If you're not English it's hard to understand the subtle nuances of life for English Londoner s who don't meet the bizarrely wonderful, parody lives that US films like Notting Hill and four weddings /the Hugh Grant illusion depict. And, why the depression cuts so profoundly deep for a young woman called Emily who, though I didn't realize it then, was already coming to the end of my road in the UK.
Maybe it's the fact that it's freezing, but not cold enough to turn the slush into beautiful white snow flakes. Maybe it's the way that rainy snow settles on the ripples in the Thames with nothing but the neon lights of the Tate Gallery shadowed across the river in the distance to remind you that people are partying everywhere, but you. Not you. You're on your own. Or the fact that when I look around on the tube, I feel like I'm the only white English face, a stranger in my own city. Whatever the case, this time of year in London, it gets dark at 4pm in the afternoon, and as always, people walk silently pass you in the street, even at Christmas. Even when you smile. So much for the spirit of Jesus.
London swells to over 14 million people during the day, but the isolation of it, and the way people don't communicate there can be so different to Brooklyn which is now home.
I've no plans on moving back across the pond anytime soon. The dullness of those grey skies and loneliness are indelibly etched into my memory. How strange it was, that for the first time in my adult life, in this historically lovely city that was where I completed my first degree, that the following events of the true life experience I am about to reveal should play out against this urban setting. What follows is the first time I've ever spoken let alone written about how I and David met.
My name is Emily. It was a cold winter night in 2010, at a late night Japanese noodle house called Wagamama, a short distance from the Tower of London where I ended up with my ice skate bag, nursing very sore legs from too many double salchows and too many sleepless nights studying, taking shelter from the cold at 11pm. Even starbucks in London closes at 8pm, so this was the only place round there, other than a Zizzi pizza joint to go. Among those quaint, old cobbled streets filled with the history of Ann Boleyn and the fortress like slits of the Bloody Tower nearby, in this unlikely dwelling, I ound my first real BDSM partner, David.
I will always remember the blue Bjork shirt he was wearing with a little radiohead mascot sewn onto the trim. He was reading a book, not on Kindle, but a torn, well fingered copy of one of John Keats poetry collections that I can't remember. Maybe it was Tennyson.
Eerily, there was hardly anyone in the café.
"Aren't you cold in that T-shirt? It's freezing outside!" I couldn't help but ask him smiling, as I sat down to eat at the canteen bench across.
"No, I'm fine," he replied looking up, a little geeky in cute round glasses. He seemed to do a double take at me. "I love how pink your nose has gone in the cold," he said smiling.
"It's the eternal ice skaters nose," I replied. "My skin is so pale in this weather."
Those were the 3 sentences I remember. Quickly we had struck up a pleasant conversation across the canteen benches in Wagamama, and even sooner he asked if he could join me on my bench, and move across, to which I was secretly thrilled. We were like 2 ships in the night. The last two people in the café.
As the Wagamama staff politely hassled us to finish up and pay the bill, dying to get home and clock off, I realized I had found a special gem in this place.
David was 23 and a newly graduated solicitor. Successful but also desperately unhappy. A geeky loner who, in his own socially acceptable kind of way, was meant to meet me that day in the cold slushy snow flurries by the Tower of London.
I don't believe in fate, but some encounters are just meant to be. We talked. We walked across tower bridge, under the Mayor of London's building and talked for hours. We both had no where to go, it was Friday, it just felt good to walk with him and he held my ice skating bag when I said my shoulder was hurting.
We exchanged phone numbers, taking 1 hour to say goodbye, which is always a good sign I think, before ending up at 3am driving to the West End in his completely ridiculous red Volkswagen beetle.
We ended up in a late night hotel bar near Piccadilly. Too much wine, and since I trusted what I met, and I trust myself, I invited him back to my dig. Probably a good thing anyway, since he was by that time way over the limit to drive back to his apartment in Clapham. I'd broken the cardinal rule of what every good girl is warned to never do, invite a stranger home. But it's hardly as though we jumped into bed!
So I invited David back to my student flat in the halls of residence at LSE, a man I had known like 5 hours. I think it was the fact he was an LSE grad himself, it was like old days for him.
Being honest though, it was the fact we had such an unusually natural rapport, 2 like-minded English people stranded, lost in different ways in this great though overcrowded city. We destined to be a conservative couple with a difference. It was as though David had a gift; he could pick up on my inner psyche. My need to be in charge and the dominant force in the home. From the outset, my dominant soul and his submissive, gentle demeanor just meshed together like a perfectly fitting lock and key.
From the time he insisted on getting out of his driver's seat and rushing round the car to open the door for me, despite the fact it was pouring with rain. He was so different to all the pseudo-intellectual jerks at LSE and outright football louts trashing around the West End after the theaters close. He was a breathe of fresh air, and yes, that night, he did sleep in my bedroom, on the floor at the foot of my bed, without any pillows, which he insisted.
