But if you try sometimes, you might find... you get what you need.

It's 4:36am on a Monday morning, I'm sitting alone in my bed with a cigarette in my left hand as I type, messily getting ash fragments on my keyboard and smoke in my eyes - I can hear the trucks loading up outside, goodness knows what they are loading or unloading, they do it every morning and have woken me almost every dawn since I moved in here. I think it used to bother me, now it's a calming sound - the familiarity of my apartment, my home.
I'm listening to 'You Can't Always Get What You Want' on repeat by The Rolling Stones, it has become my leaving song. Ever since that jet lagged and valium encrusted morning of coming back to Melbourne when I heard it as though I'd never heard it before it has made me envision packing up my apartment and closing the door for the very last time before I board a one way flight to London. To possibility.
I never thought I'd leave Melbourne. Not since I 'grew' up anyway. I used to dream of a life in New York City. Of a endless whirlwind of black coffee and whiskey in the morning, noon and night. A world where I could be an actress, poet, a singer in a jazz band. A nobody and somebody all at once.
That dream dimmed to the back of my mind the older I grew, the more comfortable I became with mediocrity. The less likely it seemed that I would ever get out of my city, even for a holiday - the more I would settle on staying here forever.
But last year in December I saw the city I thought I would always belong to. I saw it and it somewhat disgusted me. The city was so different from my countless dreams it featured in previously. It was scared of itself and of the people that dwell within her confines. The busy atmosphere of New York was cold and unwelcoming. It wasn't the world I thought I would feel so suited to. I was disappointed. I didn't know where to look - so I stopped searching altogether. I thought that if New York was not the place for me, there surely was not somewhere other than Melbourne where I belonged.
Then one mid March morning I arrived into Stansted Airport in London, a fit of tears upon arrival had me wanting to turn home immediately. I was nervous to meet London, I'd only recently started to get to know it. I was not ready to be let down again. I thoroughly enjoyed a cheeky British accent, a good comedy brought to you by the BBC, a perfectly composed musical piece from the Madchester movement of the 1980s. But that was as far as my relationship with London had formed so far. I had no opinion on it, I didn't expect I would like it much or dislike it either.
How wrong I was. And yet I suppose that is always the way when you truly form an opinion of something or somewhere you don't really know well - you are quite often let down because nothing lives up to the beautiful idea you have in your mind. Your mind never creates a reality and truth where flaws exist. New York had no flaws for me until I arrived. London - it might have. I hadn't considered it yet to much of an extent.
It didn't take me long to see London's flaws, though there are many - there are not many that stop me from loving it there more. It is as though in London, unlike New York, the more real and honest you are - the more accepted you are. This is obvious if you look at a tabloid from either city - the people on pedestals from the US are generic cookie cutter celebrities made to be role models, never aloud to open their mouths without a publicist first rewriting their words in case the public take what they are saying in a way other than intended, or to show any flaw or fault they might actually have. This repression leads to the inevitable downfall of even the best of us. Whereas in the UK it seems that the people worshipped by the general public usually have an obvious flaw or background story that only makes you feel closer to them, makes them appear more human and less like some rose coloured version of what someone else wants you to see. They are inevitably more sleazy, they use drugs more publicly, fuck freely amongst each other, they grew up below the poverty line - in real life, not just because their managers want you to believe they were once 'one of us'.
In a country where the more character you have, the more likely you are to be believed or accepted, how could I not fit in?
In Melbourne I lead a life of perhaps notable interest - in London, I will be commonplace citizen existing in anonymity with the other millions of people doing the same thing day to day.

It's hard to be in London and look out onto the grand buildings of the city, or the tiny townhouses in Shoreditch or the community housing within Mile End and see anything dismal. Even in the worst of areas, wherever I looked I saw something better than I've been seeing for a really long time.
The tube - whether running efficiently or not so much, interested me. The masses of people, the reality that you could go days without really seeing anyone you knew, whilst to many might seem lonely or dreary - only made me feel so much less so. Loneliness may just be a state of mind, perhaps it's only what you make of it - but I never really felt alone. Whether I really knew anyone there or not.

In twelve weeks I board a plane to London, preferably with much more luggage then last time and no real intention to ever come back. I want to be one of the millions of people that you get lost within when you come over to experience this sea of people and I want to be someone you stand next to on the tube that you never speak to nor really acknowledge but that makes you feel less homesick just for being there. I want to be able to say I lived in London and I want to tell stories of the city when my friends visit and I show them around.
I dream about it almost every second. I crave to be back there but to call it my home. I desire London the way I've only desired a loved one in the past. It consumes my daily thoughts, it is what I breathe and the reason I wake up each morning. Everything that I do from this moment to the second that I leave it only to get me closer to being there.

I'll see you soon London. This time - I won't be leaving. x