ambulanceindisguise:

London is the city where the streets meet the sky in a grey agreement.

The fierce love I hold for this city overwhelms me like the cracking of the spears of sunlight that stream into my kitchen on a Saturday.

The grey sky… to describe it as grey would be acceptable once. The second time it’s an amateur watercolour painted too heavy and layered, a sausage-and-mash of the harshest muddy blue and black, hues of grass and yellow, smokey tones that lose definition and blend blend blend until the sky emerges.

The buildings like it, i can tell - by the way they their mirrored faces welcome the clouds and rain and reflect the light, inviting them into the traffic.

I watch the junkie at the station buy flowers from the stall opposite when I walk past. He tries to sell them, profit for the next fix, a washed out flower child, discarded, like a cigarette just before the turnstile.

The bright cranes are in direct conflict with the sky - mechanical giraffes gracefully mating across afternoon windows.

How many more metaphors can this city take? Already swelling up to the brim with foreign matter. Already weary with tommorrow, the daily congregation of salmon, filing upstream on escalators. Sardine situations. Close up underground polaroids of fragments of commuters, burnt onto my memory in the harsh tungsten lights. Already sticky sweet with the smell of warm bodies and alcohol, it turns me on - with its dirt and its distance and its mannerisms.

I feel like a child, I crave it’s approval, I crave for it to accept me into its secret society. I want to blend in with the stations and Tesco’s and five a.m. pigeons.  

It glows, with pride and council housing. Explodes at me with tree blossoms at the start of spring, with embankment glitter on a sunny evening, the air smelling like rough jazz and overwhelming caramel. The rain always sneaks in, drizzling at first, never loud or obnoxious. Civilised, friendly rain. Saxophonies of street kids, sexual in tight skinny black jeans with pointy toed boots, slinking up the sidewalks, estimating, on the prowl.

The slippery tracks of the trains slide like that drop of hot sweat worming its way down down my back, underground.

I look around and see little bits of love happening. Amazing people you would, but won’t get the chance to, as they’re leaving in a day or in a month or a moment - king-crossing on a slip of parallell universe, a sliver of acknowledgment of an hour in this lifetime that meant more - the comedown, London’s gracious payback for making you so high.

I have it to myself walking at night through its weekday evenings. This city sleeps at night, and I’m left to its devices. We consider each other then, alone with our thoughts, until a bus stop.