on finding happiness

I'm living an odd phase of my life right now, where the thing I've dreamt of for years is happening. This is the thing I've been waiting for, the living in London, studying at uni thing. Here I am, finally.


Today was the first day since my arrival in London that I spent alone. It's been nonstop until now, and if there's one absolute I know about myself, it's that I need to be alone a lot.

So today I slept in, made myself a proper breakfast and ate it in silence, looking over London through the kitchen window. Took the tube to Hyde Park (because I'm new enough to London that taking the tube still feels like a treat, although the man sitting opposite me & masturbating slightly wrecked it for me; it's odd how at first you laugh it off and change carriages and think to yourself how utterly inappropriate people can be, but then you realise you do feel violated, strangely), and then walked down to the small lake, then all the way back home.

London is strangely warm, and I keep forgetting that it's London, somehow. It's a strange city for me to get to know; I'm used to the smaller scale of Helsinki, and to cities by the sea. Cities by rivers have a different geography entirely, they keep spreading out.


But while walking through Hyde Park today I stopped for a moment in my glorious moment of weekend melancholy and thought about how quickly and easily the big changes in life can happen.

Though I would say that I've mostly been quite consistently happy and content for the past year or so, as far as general moods go, there is a new level of happiness to be reached by moving onward, by reaching out, by grabbing those dreams and pinning them down.

I don't know how long this will last, this shiny newness of everything. The rainy weeks will come, when everything is boring and faded and tired, but for now everything is still far too fascinating, far too good. So much better than what I dreamt of for all those years, because those were dreams and this is real.