Perhaps it was the fact that the sky was always grey, that the air was perpetually oppressive, heavy with that dreary atmosphere, threat of rain, and stench of overcrowded spaces. Perhaps it was that no matter where he went there was someone always there, someone always in the way, someone always talking, and that there was no privacy, or more importantly, that there was nowhere to grow. It had seemed that growth stifled under the weight of time, that whatever growth there was or had been, was long finished by now.

But London would always be close and dear to his heart. After all, it was his home. And as clichéd as it sounded, this was where he was born and raised. It was a place so rich with its age and history and culture and architecture, and really, it was all he knew. He wasn't a homebody by any means, but there was just something about London that he understood: it never changed in its fundamental sense, it always stood still in its glory, it always stood eternal in his mind.

Sure, he had traveled extensively all around the world; he was particularly impressed with India. However, India, he found, was too much like home; the same oppressive atmosphere, oppressive due to its poor standards perhaps (whereas with London it had been its stifling unbearableness), but it had still been oppressive nonetheless. He had always found comfort, as mean as it sounded, in the fact that there were places like India that were more crowded with people than London, and that more people were worse off than he was, so he really shouldn't have felt ungrateful for where he was at. But that didn't mean he had to appreciate where he was in his life.

No, he needed something new, something new, and clean, and large. That's why he was moving to America, or more specifically: the Middle-of-Fucking-Nowhere, Texas. He didn't care where in Texas; he just knew that it was the choice of preference. Alaska would have been too desolate; he didn't want no human contact, he just didn't want a lot of it. So in fact, Arthur Kirkland had a great determination to set out and to start anew and have that privacy he oh-so craved. And Texas seemed the place to do it with its crazy heat and very private conscientious people.

Fate, of course, had other plans for him.

It always did.


So, I'm not really sure where I'm going with this, but it came to me randomly while I was watching T.V. about these people trying to rent some space down in the Hackney area of London. I swear they purchased a shoebox! It was practically the size of my dining room!

But I thought, it'd make a good reason to get England down in America, right? 3