The Phoenix Diaries: The Chapter Where I Am Creating My Own Perfect Days
A film about a man cleaning toilets in Tokyo somehow explained my entire move to London
Phoenix Diaries
Personal stories of transformation, heartbreak, and rebuilding from ground zero.
I moved to London and the first film I watched was about a man cleaning toilets in Tokyo.
Which feels about right, spiritually speaking.
There I was, newly arrived, sitting in the cinema room of the building where I now live (yes, I’m bougie like that; I have a cinema room… wild!), still trying to wrap my head around the fact that this is my life for the next six months. London outside. Suitcases upstairs. A nervous system somewhere between “new dawn” and “where the hell is my other bag?”
And the universe, with its usual flair for subtlety, handed me Perfect Days.
It was the least cinematic arrival I could have staged: a cinema room in the building where I now live, a suitcase stuck in Toronto, and a film about a man in Tokyo who wakes up, brushes his teeth, waters his plants, buys a coffee from a vending machine, drives across the city, and cleans public toilets with the focus of a monk.
And somehow, I sat there utterly captivated.
There was something in the stillness of it that got under my skin. The light through the trees, the shadow across his face, the same route and the same lunch, repeated day after day until repetition started to look like devotion.
It made me think about how much of my life has been spent chasing the dramatic turn. The big change, the next city, the new identity, the moment everything finally clicks and I become the woman I’ve been trying to meet.
I arrived in London with so much hope folded into my bags. Along with doubt, fear, pressure, bras, socks, and apparently not enough summer clothing, because one suitcase decided to remain in Toronto like a stubborn eejit with separation anxiety.
I came here wanting this chapter to matter. I want the writing to grow here, the city to open something in me, a life that feels creative, alive, expansive, and mine.
No pressure, London. Make me a genius by Tuesday.
And then this film appears. This is a film about days. Small ones. Ordinary ones. Days with work, lunch, music, books, sleep, light, dust, repetition, loneliness, beauty, the kind we dismiss while we’re busy waiting for life to become interesting.
I think I needed that.
A version of me arrived in London thinking I needed to make these six months extraordinary. Every day had to become material, every walk had to lead to insight, every café a scene, every encounter meaningful.
Good grief, woman. Have a cup of tea and calm down.
There is ambition in me, yes. There is hunger. There is a fire in my chest that has not gone out, even after the last two years tried their absolute best to pour a bucket over it.
There’s a stiller part of me now too. The part that no longer wants to sprint through her own becoming. The part that wants a morning routine, a place to buy fruit, a walk by the canal, a notebook that comes with me everywhere, a cinema room downstairs where strangers gather in the dark to watch someone else make sense of the world. The part that knows peace arrives as clean sheets, a cup of tea by the window, the same path walked so often it starts to know my feet, a song at the end of a film that stills my whole body.
At the end of Perfect Days, Nina Simone sings “Feeling Good,” and there I was, freshly landed in London, one suitcase down, feeling the whole thing settle somewhere behind my chest.
More a question than a declaration: what would it mean to feel good right now — career unfinished, bank balance shaky, half the doors still shut, the linen-and-emotional-stability version of me nowhere in sight?
Turns out: still good. Here, in this small room, this strange beginning, in the shadow and the light.
That is what the film seemed to whisper. A perfect day is one where I’m awake enough to notice it, difficult or not. Because I see the tree, taste the food, do the work in front of me with care even when nobody’s watching, and stop treating the mundane like something to escape.
There is a sacredness in routine that I think I am only beginning to understand. After years of chaos, routine can feel almost suspicious. A steady morning can feel like it’s hiding something. Peace can feel like someone left the room and forgot to tell me why. When my body has lived with disruption long enough, calm arrives wearing a false moustache, and I eye it from across the table, thinking, “What’s your game, then?”
I know that feeling well. There were days in the last two years when I truly did not know my arse from my elbow, and getting through one felt like a spiritual qualification.
Now I’m here in London, in a new room, a new rhythm, a new chance to build the ordinary on purpose. This is the real work of this act. The work is learning to live inside the day I’m actually in, showing up for the ordinary Tuesday in front of me. To write in the morning, walk when my mind gets loud, buy groceries like someone who plans to stay, notice the light on the canal, let the city reveal itself slowly, and stop demanding every chapter announce its meaning in the first paragraph.
Rude, honestly, when life refuses to provide a clean plot structure.
There is something comforting about a film that trusts repetition. It lets the man wake, work, eat, read, sleep, and begin again, without ever rushing to explain itself or shout transformation at anyone. And slowly, without fanfare, I begin to understand that life isn’t hiding somewhere beyond the routine.
The routine is the life. The care is the story. The noticing is the prayer.
This is what I’m building here. Perfect days. Or, more honestly, days I can meet with presence, days when I’ve stopped trying to outrun myself, when the shadow is allowed to sit beside the light without either one taking over the room.
There is grief here. Of course there is. There is fear here too. There is uncertainty, financial pressure, loneliness, excitement, awe, and the occasional minor domestic drama involving luggage, phone settings, and the ongoing mystery of British plugs.
The full buffet.
And still, there is something beautiful unfolding. In the hush of it, the mundane of it, the small rituals I’m beginning to choose. Maybe I’m here to make peace with ordinary days until they become perfect in their own understated way.
Somewhere between the new dawn and the missing suitcase, that’s where I landed. Me, in the dark of a London cinema room, finally listening.
Tell me…
What’s your version of cleaning toilets in Tokyo, the unglamorous thing you'd secretly love to master?