4.47AM, micro windows and (un) lockdown.
![Building.jpg](https://static.wixstatic.com/media/df4d26_c5fca430992c46228bd51af5992b5f9c~mv2.jpg/v1/fill/w_417,h_558,al_c,q_80,usm_0.66_1.00_0.01,enc_auto/Building.jpg)
anthropocentric
saturation point
It’s 4.47am in London. I’m in a bizarre area - who calls a suburb St Katherine’s & Wapping anyway? It doesn’t really matter. I haven’t slept the whole night.
Somehow, I’m still buzzing with energy. It’s the first time I’ve seen the sunrise in London since I saw it rise over the horizon on the plane over here in November. The same kind of feeling is here: being in the right place at the right time, despite everything which brought you here.
It’s nice. It’s really quiet. It’s exactly what London felt like for two whole months. Something about it is comfortable, despite how confronting those two months were.
Finally a sense of normality is returning. There’s this weird feeling I can’t shake, something nauseating about the phrase ‘new normal’. Probably something to do with being made to wear gloves at your favourite record store, waiting in lines to go into stores where you can’t try things on and throwing away way too many coffee cups than you’re proud to admit. It’s this weirdly unsettling rush to get back to life, and I’m not quite sure I’ve found the right words to articulate it yet.
Either way, I can’t say I mind it. Conversation flows so easily now. Each morning as I get my coffee I overhear (or eavesdrops, oops) the conversations of others.
Two men talking about ‘microwindows’ of changes where the course of your life is changed within a period of days.
A woman asking her daughter if she did her reading for school today.
Friends talking about their weekend plans (because the weekend finally exists again).
It’s an appreciation which can only come down from an anthropocentric saturation point; a point where our limits are truly reached. But the rise is so different from the fall, and you’d think we’d be used to the uncertainty of it all by now.
Despite it all, I feel ridiculously content. Suddenly I’ve realised that thinking about the future doesn’t make me any happier than just taking each day as it comes. Suddenly, now that I’m constantly surrounded by friends and flatmates, I can finally remember the feeling of really enjoying my own company and independence. Suddenly, working from home is actually this year’s best silver lining. Suddenly, I feel like I might know myself better.
Suddenly, this might all be for something.
JUNE 24