The books on our shelves arrange themselves. A visitor to our house might wonder what perverted system of order we’re using, what method of organization. It’s not like a library; there are no numbers on the spines, no categories. Nothing is arranged alphabetically, by genre or by import. We’ve lived together for two years now, but from the moment I moved in our books have co-mingled, kept each other company. There was never any question of separating our collections. It would be futile at best, disastrous at worst; we both saw this (contrast with the experiences of other book lovers, for whom a marriage of libraries is a Major Event–I start to think the Man and I are stranger than anyone thought possible). A separation of books would be like a separation of selves; it would be akin to sleeping in separate beds. A false intimacy.

Two years later the books have shifted, as books tend to. Very few are still where they started out on the shelves; and some don’t make it on to the shelves at all, but lie in piles by the side of the bed or on the desk. We have many books. This haphazard system ought to perplex us; but the funny thing is this: mid-sentence, sometimes, one of us will need a very specific book, maybe one we haven’t looked at properly in years, and we always know where it is. We know exactly what books we have and don’t have and could, if pressed, probably tell the story of every single volume in this house (that one bought second-hand in Boston, that one stolen from an ex-girlfriend, that one borrowed and never returned to a friend, that one purchased from an anonymous Waterstones somewhere). It’s as if we both have this massive, mental catalog, shared, full of shifting information.

But this is why I think there is an order, after all; this is why I think the books arrange themselves. Because the way they are means that whatever you are looking for, whatever you need most to read at any moment, will suddenly pop out at you. In any room of the house you will find yourself looking at a wall of books, or at least a pile, and if you’re desperate enough, one of them will start to shimmer, or to call to you, will demand all of your attention, and when you pick it up you will realize that yes, of course, this is what you were looking for–even if you hadn’t known you were looking for anything at all. Maybe it’s because of this, which I found in the book I hadn’t realized I desperately needed until I slid it from the shelf last night: “the meaning of things lies not in things themselves, but in our attitudes to them.”*

*Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, as quoted at the start of A.C. Grayling’s The Meaning of Things

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Here’s what they don’t tell you.

You will be depressed and adrift. You will finish and not be satisfied. There will be no champagne reception, no late-night parties or quiet celebrations. There will be months to wait for the result, months during which you can carefully go over each word, wish to revise each word, hate each word, months during which you can decide that none of it matters, and then that all of it matters, more than anything else. To distract yourself, you might throw yourself into something. Say, you decide to finish your novel. You decide that you don’t need them anyway. You’ll be an author with or without the marks. Numbers are useless anyhow, in a literary world. (Wrong, as always). It’s not an easy process but at least it’s a busy period of time. At least you feel like the struggles are leading you somewhere.

Then there’s the moment when the results are delivered to your doorstep. You think, ah, at last, now I can be released. Either way, at least I can move forward without being shackled to this thing, this thing you’ve come to think of as a burden, not an accomplishment, not a gift. But what they don’t tell you is that it’s not like that. Now you revisit the words you loved, hated, wanted to change, wanted to let loose on the entire world. Now you have new eyes with which to see them. Now those months of work are erased with a single glance; no, you’re not an author, with or without them. You’re a number, a sentence, a name with a few extra letters attached. You’ve wasted your time, or you haven’t, but none of that matters.

In the moment of discovery, all that matters is this: you’re still shackled to that thing. That thing you created, that thing you started. Whatever it turns out to be, or doesn’t, it belongs to you (or is it that you belong to it, that you somehow owe it something?). You have to own it whether you want to or not. You have to decide what to do with it, because no one else can.

They don’t tell you this.

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Every time I come here I see a different city.

The first time I visited New York I was twelve. It was nothing to me but the place of my mother’s birth; and therefore, though my only impressions of it were vague and fluid, like a film, I had some invisible tie to it. I had heard place names. Brooklyn place names, mostly, because that was where she had lived; in a cramped apartment on Flatbush Avenue. I knew names. But I had no capacity to envisage anything.

So it was like being shaken in a bottle and then tipped out onto a map full of foreign words. We took a red-eye from LAX, stopped over in Las Vegas. I remember the glitter of lights, a garish city that looks beautiful only when viewed from above, in the haze of half-sleep. We stayed with friends of friends somewhere in Brooklyn, but I was still young enough not to pay enough attention to things. We took subways and cabs. Towards the evening we rode all the way out to Coney Island. That was another place-name I had known. Coney Island. I hadn’t known how to picture it, but maybe, in a vague sort of way, I had compared it in my head to Balboa Island, because they were both called “island”, because I had fond memories of playing arcade games at Balboa, winning prizes.

Coney Island was dying, dead. A warm, empty wind blew through the streets (this was April, and still cold, but slowly thawing out). The light was yellowish, brownish. We stood watching ferris wheels and roller-coasters decay before our very eyes; then we had a hot dog at Nathan’s and took the train back and I fell asleep listening to my mom describe the wicker subway seats of her childhood.

Later that weekend we visited the Met; I decided it wouldn’t be so bad, maybe, to live in an apartment overlooking 5th avenue, and then you could pop in and out of the museum whenever you wanted, visit each room and lavish each painting, each sculpture, with the attention it deserved. Easy. I liked the thought of luxury, then. We went and used the bathrooms in Saks Fifth Avenue; I was bowled over by the price tags on things. I remember particularly a lime-green silk woman’s suit, priced at about $700. I could wear lime-green silk suits and visit the Met; yes.

We went to the Village, to Bleecker street where I spent some time in a Tibetan shop buying prayer flags, embroidered pillowcases that smelled of incense, blue paper lanterns, and then to a shop full of wooden and knitted things; I bought a hat. At another shop, our friend tried on vintage fur coats, slipping them over her pale Burberry.

But that trip was mostly the Brooklyn Museum trip. We went on what I remember as a dewy day; bits of sunlight, droplets of water on the leaves in the botanic gardens, through which we strolled slowly and deliberately, savouring each springtime smell, feeling the hot, moist air of the greenhouses, until we arrived at the museum, and went upstairs where we looked at an exhibit of Hiroshige drawings. I remember the simplicity, the clean lines and colours. I was entranced. From the gift shop I bought a little necklace, a pink flower on a red beaded rope. I made notes in an embroidered notebook from Chinatown (I probably still have it somewhere, those notes are preserved).

I went back other times after that. I visited college campuses in a snowstorm (my enduring memory of that trip is drinking a hot chai latté from a funny little bar near NYU called the White Rabbit). I went for a spectacular run through Central Park. I sipped Sierra Nevada in a grotty Midtown hotel room with a few college friends. I spent a week on the Upper West Side, taking the subway, reading Don Delilo.

Each trip was made of impressions, of highlights between exhausted nights. Each trip was to a different New York; and I’m still trying to find the general New York, the essence of it, the thing that connects those highlights and impressions.

In the meantime, we’ve had a breathless, beautiful time here.

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There were ukulele players aplenty. I’ve never seen so many ukulele players. There were good musicians and bad musicians. There was bowling and beer. Kids danced, hipsters slouched (and there were a lot of hipsters, because this was Williamsburg, the hive of hipster-dom, the skinny-jean capital of the world). There were women on stage in tutus and leather pants and men with beards and one blonde dude wearing sunglasses playing the sitar. There were guitar cases and songbooks everywhere. It was strange to be a writer, an anything-else, in a sea of musicians. A non-musician in a musician’s world. There were blow-up saxophones (somewhere out there is a video of Ben and Xander and me swaying like big band brass players to our neon pink plastic saxes). There was confetti, flash photography. A good voice carried all the way across the room. Families in bowling shoes forgot their purpose, spilled onto the dance floor, swayed their hips. There’s that Lewis Carroll quote? “We’re all mad here.” We were all mad, there.

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Late lunch followed by a walk in the park. Not just any park. An elevated park. We’re up amongst the buildings–not above them, not looking up at them from the street, but weaving through them, like we’re hovering, like it’s magic. The sun sets behind us as we walk (through? over?) the meatpacking district. We can see into art galleries and meeting spaces, meet the eyes of billboard models. A strange yellow light descends upon the city, then melts away, into the night. We stand watching the long straight lines of the streets, the headlights, the glitter of windows. When we come down, our feet feel heavy. We’ve been floating.

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