Here Comes the Sun

Thursday March 6/2014

My love affair with this city grows ever stronger as each day seems to pass by more quickly than the last. A week into March already, and I feel like if I so much as blink, two years will have come and gone and my heart will be breaking as I am forcibly removed from this enchanted country by several armed men, and perhaps one butch female looking one. 

Spring is popping up all over London. Cherry blossoms frame the streets, the wind has calmed and the days are longer and warmer. Sweaters and coats are gradually disappearing allowing the sun to shine on pale, untouched, winter skin. Morning after morning (let's be honest, afternoon after afternoon) I am awoken by the sun filling my quaint third floor room and I'm… happy. It's the strangest thing. Every morning I wake up feeling excited, fresh, eager. I keep my room clean, I do the dishes… voluntarily. I fold my clothes and brush my teeth, like TWICE a day. I read books in cafes, and grocery shop for things like bananas and chorizo sausage. I'm a grown up. Living in London. At this point, I don't know which sounds more unbelievable. Whatever it is, there is something about being here that just makes me feel good. Like for the first time in my life my head's actually been screwed on properly. And things are just happening, the way they should, when they should. I got a job, the first and only I applied for. I saw The Alexandra pub while out on one of my daily strolls and thought, Yup. I'm going to work there. Two days later I walked in with my resume and walked out employed. And for some reason I just knew it would be that simple. I didn't even bother to print off more than one resume. I had no intention of hitting the pavement, harassing pub after pub for employment. It was going to happen. Just like that. One pub, one minute interview, done. 

And friends. I'm making friends. In the almost 25 years of my existence, I have never cared to make friends, to put effort into people who weren't already a part of my life. I can say without having to think twice, that within the past 4 years I have made 2 solid friends. And those two friends started as co-workers. People I had to see everyday regardless of whether I liked them or not. Lucky for me, they're the shit so it was easy to befriend them. But that's exactly my point. I hate everyone. I wouldn't be caught dead going out of my way to befriend a complete stranger. My god, the effort. Yet here I am, a social butterfly, fresh from the cocoon, who recently accepted an invite to attend a guy's band gig at some random venue in SoHo because we got to talking at The Crate the other night and he seemed tolerable. His name is Isaac. Isaac was one of the many bartenders who forced wine teeth bitch's fists off my face that fine evening. Isaac is in a two man band called Two Cartoons. I ended up making friends with Isaac and making out with Cartoon number two. A very productive evening I would say. Then there's Elizabeth, a girl I met conveniently while crushing on an adorable Aussie I had been eyeing all night at the BelleVue… the Aussie she happened to be currently sleeping with, no less. We laughed, and her response to me drooling over her mate was something along the lines of, Why wouldn't you? Look at him. You might as well just come home with us tonight. And bam. (No I didn't have a threesome with Elizabeth and hot Aussie, but I'll  be damned if I say I didn't consider it). No, the bam is more of a, I'm now a guest at her birthday party next week, and unlike Canadian Chelsea, who would sooner don a pair of sweats and spend the night with Ben and Jerry's and Jimmy Fallon reruns, British Chelsea will actually be attending… with bells on. There are also the friends I have been making via my roommate. Friends that greet me at the movie theatre I frequent almost daily (Dan the Man manages the cinema down the street so I get the honour of free admission, which basically makes my life complete). George gives me hugs from behind the counter and suddenly I'm a local. The other night in fact, I was out with Angela in Clapham for our first official London pub crawl experience and wouldn't you know, we run into my friend Christie at our first destination. She greets me with a giant hug and once again, I'm a local. No big deal. 

But establishing evidential proof of local status via friend bumping-inage wasn't the only brag worthy development from that pub crawl evening. No, no. Definitely not. Allow me to paint you a picture…

The night is getting closer to morning. With each new pub/club/bar proving more obnoxious than the previous, a certain "local foreigner" is most likely to blow a fuse if one more juiced up, roid infested rugby player offers to "make her a cup of tea" as sexual innuendo for "let's go fuck in a bathroom or a broom closet". And with that charming invitation, Angela and I leave the current man cave of a bar with the intention of giving up and heading home with a bottle of wine, and what's left of our faith in the male human species. However, instead of turning off down the narrow, cobble stone street towards home and wine, we decided to brave one last bar that looked a tad less obnoxious than the rest. We walk in, do a quick lap around, and decide we were mistaken and head right back for the exit, defeated, exhausted, and sorely disappointed by the lack of proper beautiful british men the evening presented. As we push our way through the sea of swaying drunken wankers, Angela stops suddenly and looks up (she has to do this a lot, she's quite small). "Him." She says to me. I follow her gaze up to a man. A very beautiful man. A very tall, very beautiful man. He is standing by the doorway with another man (this man will eventually tell me his name is Gary) and they are now staring at me, maybe 10 feet between us. Gary is nudging very tall, very beautiful man and nodding in my direction, saying something that I only assume is regarding me. They continue to talk about me while I stand there confused and intrigued, but unable to tare my eyes away from very tall, very beautiful man. Finally Angela breaks my trance and says something like, if you don't make a move on this guy we're going home. Move it or lose it. (I love her motivational talks, so comforting) So I move it, right over to the doorway where the men stand, our eyes still focused on each other. 

"So, were you just planning to stand here and talk about me, or were one of you going to find the balls to come over and actually talk TO me?" 

I may have caught them off guard with that one because they both just stood there, these dumbfounded expressions on their faces, followed by strange, slightly awkward laughter. Gary finally says, "I was actually just telling my friend, Sean here that you look like you came from the Olympics." His name is Sean. Very tall, very beautiful man has a name. Sean. When I realize that I have no idea how long I've been staring at this face that now has a name, I force myself to take my eyes off Sean's ridiculously perfect jaw structure and focus on whether I should take Gary's opening line as a compliment or… no I really have no idea what that was. But now based on my accent, I must have been participating in ice hockey at the Olympics, bla bla bla, Sean's face, bla bla bla. Ok, enough Gary. No time to waste. I tell Sean my friend and I were actually just about to leave, and he asks if he buys me a drink will I stay? Uh ya duh. 

"Well, I guess I could." Way to play it cool, Chels. Two highballs and three hours later, we've shut down two bars, neither of which I could describe since my face was attached to his more than it wasn't. We danced, we talked, we swapped saliva. It was magical. And then it was time to go. But instead of the standard, come home with me discussion, he did something so shocking, and staggeringly unexpected. He asked if he could take me on a date on Friday. I mean maybe romance really is dead because this caught me entirely off guard. 

"Soooo… you don't want to come home with me tonight?"

He begins to blush, and smiles. "I'm really looking forward to our date on Friday."

"Mmhm, ya. So, again. You don't want to come home with me tonight…" I'm confused. 

Again, he smiles. 

"What man wouldn't want to go home with you? But I am just really looking forward to our date on Friday."

Is this for real? Did I actually just stumble upon one of the world's most endangered species, the rare and incredibly uncommon "gentleman"? And here I thought courtship had gone extinct, when directly in front of me is a man who wants to date me. Not only date me, but date me before he sleeps with me. I was speechless. But somehow managed to pick my jaw up off the floor and wipe the stunned expression from my face in enough time to give him my number and still leave him with a flawless goodbye. A soft kiss, a half smile, and just a touch of a strut since I was pretty confident he was watching me walk away. 

The next morning I awoke to a text from very tall, very beautiful Sean. 

There may be more in the London air than just Spring.