Reflection on London, Part 10. (Photo by Emily Quinn, 2015)
It’s hard to believe I’m down to my last two weeks in London. It’s even harder to believe that 85 days in London have come and passed so quickly, so quietly, and yet with so much vibrancy; in color, in people, in sights seen, in places explored.
Some of this still feels like a well-thought out, heavily planned and faraway dream for my future. I remember being fourteen and trying, every single night, to lucid dream. No matter what I did before going to sleep, no matter what psychological journal article on REM cycles I read and studied religiously, I couldn’t do it. I found myself unable to control my dreams, much less be aware when they were happening.
Being in London feels like how I imagine lucid dreaming feels.
Not necessarily in the sense that I have control; because, if anything, I’ve come to find myself not always being able to control the outcome of a given situation in my time here.
Being in London feels like how I imagine lucid dreaming feels because, since my arrival at London-Heathrow, I’ve adopted this surrealist sense of everything going on around me, a heightened awareness of how long in the making my being here has been – and then my rejection of that reality, as I’m living in it. Talk about self-sabotage.
But London has slowly crept into my bloodstream, the near 100-days of living and working and studying here have found their way into my thoughts and actions – nearly every page of my journal is covered in romanticized observations and drawings of London life. I’ve let myself become an observer rather than a participant since getting here. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing; it’s just the way things ended up.
In other news, I just figured out the most wonderful way of getting a quick breath of life into my protagonist for my short story: being awful at math and a tendency to be lazy, googling age calculators. I want to make sure the ages of the characters align with the specific historical events in the years surrounding Lady Di’s death. I typed in the dates, and it felt like I was entering a coordinates for a time machine. The split second it took to calculate and display the answer was followed by my wanting to make my protagonist have life.