Edited by Sakshi Bhagat
In London, I experienced what it felt like to live in a city like never before. As I walked those streets with both centuries-old buildings and modern skyscrapers towering over me, feeling my heart beat in sync with the mechanical rhythm of the city, the ebb and flow of tourists, the quiet flowing of the Theames, the coming and going of the trains, I could feel my self dissolving, becoming part of the pulsing crowds, the stream of pedestrians and vehicles.
As I continue to explore the city, I can’t help but think of a concept in calculus: limits. Wikipedia defines a limit in the following way: “a limit is the value that a function approaches as the argument approaches some value.” In other words, according to the concept of limits, x is said to ‘tend towards’ c if x’s value approaches the value of c without actually taking on that value of c. I can’t help but think of how x and c are close but not really close: how there’s always some distance between x and c.
I feel the same way about London. I am close to the city, but not really close to it. I feel like I know London, its routes, its history, but the more people I talk to, the more places I visit, I realise how little I know about it. There are stories, histories, everywhere– in the dark alleys between streets, in the old trees in the parks created centuries ago, by the fireplaces in old pubs, in the gray waves of the Thames that shimmer in the August sunlight– that I walk past without even realising it. To be in London is to be in the heart of one of the greatest and oldest cities in the world, but to also be a stranger to it. Every day I try to reduce the vast, echoing distance between me as a tourist and the city, only to find it expanding and growing the more I try.
All my experiences here are characterized by this feeling of hovering between intimacy and strangeness, familiarity and unfamiliarity.
I am sitting on a bench in a park and right next to me, two sisters are having a conversation about their family. In that moment, as their conversation flows towards where I’m seated, I am a part of their life, and when they get up to leave, I’m suddenly nothing but a stranger, a random girl sitting on a bench. These moments of fleeting intimacy with people are everywhere: in the Tube, when you sit opposite someone and your eyes meet for a flash of a second, on the street in the morning where you see the same people everyday walking to work, in the coffee shop where the barista smiles as they hand you your coffee. These moments, these brief interactions streak past you like faint falling stars, lighting up the darkness of distance that existed between two people, and then sinking into darkness once more.
But does every interaction, every relationship have to be long and extended for it to be worthwhile? Yes, lifelong friendships and relationships are incredibly important and they add so much meaning and value to our lives, but so are these brief, fleeting encounters with people. When a stranger smiles at you on the street, when someone picks up for you the book that you dropped on the street, when a stranger strikes up a conversation with you, you are pushed out of yourself. Your eyes open. You look up. You realise that you are part of this community of human beings who love, who feel, who care. In this way, You become part of something bigger than yourself.