In London

I finally finished Anthony Bourdain's Kitchen Confidential...and feel renewed and excited. Smoke slowly creeps from a chipped and burnt tea cup, a makeshift ashtray of sorts. I have inexplicably reverted back to a student's life...well...my student life, like it was seven years ago when I was in small town Ithaca, NY in the middle of farm country, surrounded by mountains and the Finger Lakes. Things are different now. My bedroom window is opened to the damp, chilly London night air over looking the quaint but busy Judd Street in central London. I'm here and Bourdain's book, an extended love note to his passion for cooking has inspired me in the dark, early morning hours to write.

You know, when dreams come true the process is often very similar to what it feels like to dream. Let me try to clarify. Think about how it feels to dream. There is a kind of effortlessness, a speed about the way things happy. There's a blurriness about what's going on and all of a sudden there is some conclusion, you've reached to place only to realize everything that happened before, the smudges of seemingly desperate, negligible actions put you where your are at the end of it. I don't know if that makes any sense but that's how I feel. I was in DC, then I was at home in the Bahamas, then I was on the plane and now I've taken up residence in a new country, living a different life from the one I'd been living for the last year. It was just a dream, a sentence, an uttered phrase that yes, "I'm moving to London." When did this all happen? How did this all happen?

And here I am, two weeks into it all, life continuing as if I didn't really make this great leap, like I didn't uproot myself from the settled life I had in DC, leave everything familiar to me and hurtle myself at 500 miles an hour across the great Atlantic expanse to this new place.


I guess what I'm trying to grasp is the way life progresses; how it can, with the ease of a flowing stream or the violence of a foaming, heaving waterfall move from one period to the next leaving you simply there. There being wherever you dreamed yourself being or wherever you just happened end up. How much control over these things do we have and what does it mean for us when we are given or have earned the fulfillment of those dreams, landing exactly where we intended or where we said we would.

I've been dreaming about being in London for four years now. I said this is where I was going to go and I've made it. And though I'm plagued with the questions of why I was given this chance and what will this mean my future I can only be certain of what I intend to do.

I see this as a journey for me. All my life I've been propelled by the desire to make everyone that has teased me, doubted me, discouraged me and left me behind for what they thought was better or more satisfying, envy me. I'm trying to balance that now with an appreciation for the amazing things that have been set before me. I mean, shit, I'm in London, enrolled at one of the best schools in the world following what I believe to be my calling. Why I've been given these opportunities, I don't know...but I guess my intention is not to waste them.

#Beautiful