On the 17:36 to London Paddington. We keep passing those ubiquitous self-storage units. I associate them with trains now. Or perhaps it’s the other way round – I associate trains not with rolling countryside but with sprawling industrial amenities.

How can there possibly be so much stuff in the world that needs storing? Who rents these units, and for what purpose? It seems to me that once people become disengaged from their things, they cease to need them. For awhile I toyed with the idea of having some things in Oxford and some in California, but it really was pointless, and after a season I’d re-acquired everything I wanted but had left behind. The rest was duly carted off to the Salvation Army. What we own means nothing without us, not the other way around.

There’s a man who stores his furniture with us. No one really knows where he is anymore (Canada? Australia?) and it seems he has no thoughts for the things which gather dust in our house, though money continues to appear monthly in our account, like magic. Recompense for nothing at all.

So whenever I see those self-storage places I feel like I’m looking at these vast empty spaces. Even if they are full, even if people do use them – what’s the point? What’s inside is just abandoned stuff in its own abandoned world.

But back to trains. Air conditioned trains on a hot day, which always remind me of the summer I spent commuting from Goleta to Santa Ana. I was interning at the Orange County Transportation Authority (is there irony in the amount of time I spent transporting myself for those three months? Oh, yes!), spending three days down there before returning home for a long weekend. And on Wednesday evenings I’d buy a sandwich for dinner and change out of my suit and I’d catch the last train back.

Between Santa Ana and Los Angeles I’d watch the hot, pale sunlight turn into a Southern California twilight, and in that twilight we’d rush past the other side of things. People’s backyards – plastic toys, dirty pools, beer bottles. The tired backs of buildings, the places where cars go to die, the places where trucks go to stock up on goods. Warehouses and factories. A Spearmint Rhino with a neon sign and a mournful countenance.

But mostly self-storage places. They were everywhere – a part of the landscape, like rolling golden hills and stunning sea views.

You never really saw any people on that journey. A few stops out of L.A. it would suddenly be dark and you’d have to turn your eyes to the seat in front of you again, and outside there would be nothing but flashing lights.

❧

Darkness eats away at the lamplight. It’s the time of morning when everything should be still. St. Pancras glows orange and looks like a gateway to somewhere warmer and brighter.

I love the Eurostar. I love the way it feels to be moving at that speed on a pre-determined route. But I sleep the whole way because we were up so late packing and then we had to get a midnight bus to London.

We don’t have much stuff. I mostly spend the weekend in the same outfit–a bright skirt, a blouse, a pair of sandals, making the most of the August heat–except one time when I think it’s going to rain so I don a pair of leather riding boots and then it turns out to be the hottest most glorious day of the whole trip. That is the day we walk to the top of Montmartre and have lunch at a little restaurant whose name I forget. We order salads–with meat, boiled egg, avocado, beetroot–and a carafe of wine and though we’ve spent most of the day’s allotted budget on the meal there is a happiness that comes over us. We finish the wine slowly, watching a girl in a red dress and heels alight from a vespa scooter. I don’t remember coming down from Montmarte particularly though I do remember that as we do we pass a painting of a donkey on a wall and also the Lapin Agile, which reminds me of the high school production of Steve Martin’s Picasso at the Lapin Agile I once saw. (It turns out I misremember this because when I go through my photos I discover that the painting is actually of a horse, and there’s a man on the horse, riding bareback)

I remember sleeping on the floor of a friend’s empty apartment. The mattress is torn and dirty, like something you’d find in a streetside skip. There’s a refrigerator in the middle of the room where we put our juice and our cheese. The shower head is collapsing and the bath stained with rust and other unimaginable things and I avoid washing for the whole weekend, making do with splashing my face and scrubbing under my armpits with water from the sink. That’s a nice way to be, for a time.

❧

We start at dawn. Still dark, though the clocks tell us it’s high time to be up and about, starting our business, having our coffee. Breaking our ritual nightly fast.

At the bus stop, in a thin drizzle, we wait. The morning lightens but does not brighten; all the world’s covered in grey mist.

On the train we pass through a patch of snow. Beside us the Thames is thickening. A heavy brown mass; no longer the sleepy stream it always seems at Oxford. Then we diverge from the path of the river, sipping our coffee at 60 miles per hour, still half-asleep, reading our books without paying them proper attention (my mind, for instance, has already wandered to what I will write about this moment, on the train, sipping coffee). We observe the backs of business parks; strange architecture, engineering for a world built around cars and a certain kind of lifestyle, religious in its regularity. Even running away has become a bureaucratic nightmare; form-filling, proof of identity, proof of residence, pounds paid dutifully for administrative costs that no one will ever actually incur.

Then we rejoin the Thames, wide and wild now. Half-following the river into the city.

I say I like the grey austerity of London Paddington. I say I like the way the light comes in; I like the curved industrial metal. He says, Really? Disbelieving as we pass a Burger King and a W. H. Smith. But I’m looking up, past these things which are a marker of our confused time, to what once was. I see steam, trapped pigeons spreading their stained wings, the light catching dust above our heads.

(On the way back, I think: There’s nothing quite like a good long train journey to clarify, liquefy the thoughts, so they come flooding in like snowmelt in a mountain stream. I threaten to hop on a train to Penzance. But what would I do when I got to Penzance? I wonder aloud. What would you do? He says, again mildly disbelieving. Find a pub, I decide, which is as good an answer as any, and in this grim mid-winter weather, probably the most truthful I could give.)

I have my photograph taken by a cheery chemist who asks what it’s for and then, when I tell him it’s for a visa application, asks where we’re going. When I tell him Kenya, his smile widens, but he doesn’t say anything, not at first. He shows me my photo on the smudged screen of a digital camera. I look wary, my cheeks flushed by cold, my eyes bright, my mouth crooked where he told me I could smile, if I wanted, they won’t mind, it’s not like getting a British passport. My hair, which I tried to tie back in a messy, self-contained bun, has come loose, and a long strand hangs past my left ear. I’m not displeased with the photo, though. Something in it, maybe the nonchalance, appeals to me. I tell him it’s fine, and as he’s printing it from a machine mounted on the wall, he tells us he was born in Mombasa, and then asks where we’re going in Kenya. There are good flowers there, he tells us when we name the place. Beautiful flowers–you’ll see. I pay him in cash and he tells us to enjoy our trip, and goes to help a woman pushing a pram, rummaging through the cough medicines.

At the embassy, which is like all embassies–serious, hushed, full of patriotic images and metal detectors–only in miniature. We sit and fill out our forms in a narrow room. The whole affair is much more casual than I had anticipated. I’m comforted by this. It’s not like standing in my own embassy, surrounded by armed guards, being asked to relinquish my mobile phone, my iPod, my freedom for hours on end.

We hand our passports over. And there I am: a stranger in a strange land, without any proof of identity, without any means of leaving. For a moment I feel panicked; then I feel free, and lighter than I have in years. Separated from my history, my birthplace, my future plans, my work permit. Forced into the present; and he, too, beside me, parted from his paper identity. For once we are are of equal, or same, nationality; that is to say, none. Into the wet droves we emerge, dodging puddles. We head back towards the station, the train, the river, the other city with her fair spires.

Our train out had been crowded, steamy, but now, at midday, it’s as if nobody has the impetus to travel anymore, so we are as if alone in this carriage. A stray human or two, also caught on this slow passage from London to Oxford via every imaginable village in between, flips the pages of a newspaper. Someone has left a window open and the cold air comes rushing in around us each time we gather speed, but we do not protest, nor do we make any motion to close the window, for the motion of the train has already lulled us into that magical half-sleeping state of transit. The irony is that we’re now too complacent to cross the narrow car and close the window, while all that keeps us from slipping away into a heavy doze is that fresh air.

So we’re suspended by our own actions, our own inactions, our understanding of inertia.

❧

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.

❧

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.

❧