New York City

There is nothing else quite like New York City in January; the cold air freezes your lungs and bites at your cheeks. Christmas lights twinkle and the ground is covered in the confetti from the New Years Eve celebrations. In spite of feeling miniature surrounded by the concrete jungle, my heart has never felt so full, so alive and free, and so desperate to explore as it did then. It makes your whole body thrum with excited energy, it creates a new found vigour for life and makes you realise with extraordinarily sharp clarity that you will never find another place you love more. It makes your heart race and your feet move faster with the desperate need to scorch every road sign, every window, every brick and every billow of steam into your memory forever.

The winter light is so bright it’s like a new world that’s just been born, and you are the very first person to discover its wonders. You forget that there are any other places of beauty in the world because nothing, nothing compares to the feast your eyes are gorging themselves on. It is a world on its own and stirs an exquisite melancholy when I remember how it felt and seemed to me. If you were to paint my heart and soul it would be shaped like the Manhattan skyline at five in the morning, it would show my paradise.

You can be whoever you want to be, go wherever you want to go, dress how you like, meet someone new and different every day, see things you cant believe exist and explore true freedom of expression. I left my heart in New York City somewhere along Brooklyn Bridge. It is home, it's beauty, it's heaven, it’s the garden of Eden, and its taking care of my heart, patiently waiting for me.