You may have the universe if I may have London.
Take it all. You may have my happiness, my health, and my sense of purpose.
May all your dreams come to fruition, just give me London.
You may have every bit of my soul. I allow you to rip apart my heart, hide the pieces, and force me to hunt for them throughout the remaining years of my life. Just scatter them along the River Thames, on the porch of a pastel home in Notting Hill, at the bottom of the earth beneath the tracks of the Tube, and at the peak of Primrose Hill. I’ll happily continue searching forever.
I beg of you, take the clothes off of my back, the heels off of my soles, and the bag that holds my most prized possessions. Just please don’t take the grey skies that blanket me and protect me from the rest of the world.
You may have the universe if I may have London.
Forgive yourself. Be yourself. Free yourself.
I welcome a life of imprisonment if it means I may have London.
I will live within the walls of a cobblestoned cell. Trapped within the chambers of a castle housing hundreds of years worth of history.
Just allow me to lay my eyes upon the House of Parliament at sunset. Give me a chance to walk the back lanes of Chelsea. Allow me the opportunity to drink a cup of tea in the middle of Covent Garden. And possibly provide me with an afternoon under the trees in Hyde Park.
You may have anything it is you desire. The world is yours if that’s what you want. Paris, New York, Rome, Tokyo. Walk the great wall of China, bask in the turquoise water of the Maldives, hike to Machu Picchu, party until daybreak along the shores of Ibiza, ski the slopes in Switzerland. Run from one end of the planet to the other for all I care.
I will be without sacrifice.
Give me the soggy walks through Camden, the grunge of Shoreditch, and silence of Hampstead Heath.
You may humiliate me, torture me, drain me, and forget me. Pay me no mind, I will move swiftly out of sight. I will hide within the exhibits of the British Museum, in the last row of a West End musical, in the crowds of Regent Street.
You may have the universe if I may have London.
Because, you see, London is the one thing left that is still mine.
You find no man, at all intellectual, who is willing to leave London. No, Sir, when a man is tired of London, he is tired of life; for there is in London all that life can afford. — Samuel Johnson